>>Welcome back to the cosmopolitan in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with a couple thousand people here. And I got to tell you it's really great to be back in person, done a wheelchair. Join three next, the SVP of product strategy and innovation at Cooper. Donna, welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. It is great to be here and it's great to be live, but yet >>It is great to be alive. Again. I feel like I'm exhaling for the first time in a long time. >>I know, right. It's just so wonderful. I want >>To talk a little bit about you you've been a Cooper for a long time since it was just a baby startup, a little >>Baby >>Lady that also had a lot of leadership roles, product strategy, marketing, a customer experience, professional services. I also read that you have 12 software patent. I do. I love that. >>I know it's been one of the most amazing things that Coupa, which is this ability to be creative and innovate and then get your item patented. It's wonderful. >>Talk to me about, obviously the last two years have been so interesting, shall we say dynamic challenging? And we were talking before we went live that we haven't. The key bus had been that Coupa inspire, inspire hasn't happened since 2019 and it's almost three years ago. Talk to me about the last 10 years I Cooper and the massive acceleration I'm Rob was saying this morning in the keynote 3.3 trillion under spend under management almost at a trillion a year run rate. Yeah, >>We have huge. The numbers have just started to really become a fly wheel, right? More customers more spend. And really now having this big data repository of $3.3 trillion and the ability to apply AI to that data. But it really has been a journey. Um, when I joined about 11 years ago, now we had this vision, the vision was always a data centric model where we can apply AI to that data and create intelligence. And now we're finally at a volume of data where we can, we can anonymize the data and we can create insights at a level that we just were not able to do 10 years ago. >>One of the things that we've learned, I think fairly recently is that every company has to be a data company regardless of industry. Even I, I, I think about that, like my grocery store has to be a data company. Sure. There's no more, it'd be nice. If we had a data strategy, it would be nice if we actually could glean insights from our data that's table stakes, that's business critical that's differentiating. >>Absolutely. And I think, you know, I think what's really interesting in an enterprise software is that as a SAS provider, although we may host the systems, we don't actually own our customer's data. We need to actually have permission to usage of the data. And that was one of the things that Cooper did very early on, about 10 years ago, where we started working with our customers and really building that permission to use into the contracts themselves. And that has really created now this motion of having data that we can now consume and use where a lot of businesses in enterprise software had not really thought about the notion of permission to use and having data available to them. >>That's the power of the community, right? And that's one of the things that clearly sets Cooper apart from its competition. >>Yes, indeed. We have spent so many years on creating this model of how does the community and how does community.ai help each individual customer become more efficient, save more and also do good for the planet in a way that has just never been able to do, if that company was doing it alone by themselves. >>Speaking of good for the planet, let's talk about ESG, your customer conversations. ESG is broad. >>How >>Are customers approaching the topic of it to bring it in as a strategic initiative? Okay. >>You know, I think this is a really great question. So what happened about a few years ago is our customers sat down with us and we said to ourselves, if we were going to make every dollar more sustainable, more inclusive that we're spending, what would we need to do? What would that be? The places within a spend function that you could improve the outcome of that dollar to be more sustainable and inclusive. And we broke it down into so many different features. And over the last three years, we've developed, delivered over 80 different features now available in our BSM sustainable BSM toolkit that our customers can configure Coupa to impact their ESG goals positively. >>So BSM can be a facilitator of ESG or an accelerator, or >>It's definitely an accelerator. And one of the things we're trying to do is democratize the ability to do good, right? So oftentimes the larger organizations are able to invest people into these problems. Well now smaller and smaller organizations are expected to comply with government regulations. How do these businesses do it? They can do it with technology like Kupa. >>Got it. Okay. One of the things I was looking at in my prep for the event was a recent survey that Cooper did just in February. It's just a couple of months ago, 800 decision makers, >>Um, >>Who have overview or responsibility for the supply chain and businesses with over a thousand employees. And this was global. What are some of the improvements that businesses, what did you find that they want to make with respect to ESG? >>You know, I think there was a really great survey that showed businesses, have the intent they want to do good, but the problem is the act secretion of it. How do they actually make it happen? And technology systems have largely failed them or have only looked at a part of the problem without looking at the whole problem. I can give you an example, please >>Do >>So in the scope three emissions, which is on everyone's mind right now, how are we going to comply with scope three emissions? At first on the surface, it looks like a reporting problem. Oh, I'll just create a report. But the real problem is data related the data itself that these organizations have on what they purchased and who they purchased it from is terrible. And so if your data's bad, your report to the government is going to be terrible, right? So you have to look at the problem holistically solving the data problem before you get to the reporting problem. And that's what Coupa really specializes on. >>And the things I was also looking at in the survey was from an overall theme perspective that the availability and reliability of crucial supply chain data is preventing organizations from operationalizing, their corporate purpose with respect to ESG will Kupa solves that problem. >>Absolutely. >>Talk to me about that. >>Yeah. So let's talk about things like third-party risk management. When you are working in a supply chain, you need to know who your suppliers are, not just your suppliers, but their suppliers as well, tier two, tier three, tier four, or even beyond even. Um, and this is everything from anti-bribery and anti-corruption to InfoSec and GDPR and so many different government regulations on knowing who you're doing business with. And Coupa solves that problem of collecting that data from your third parties and then continually monitoring it and passing it into the different systems within your spend processes in order to make sure that the person that is making a decision, how's the data at their fingertips. >>That's critical. And you know, one of the things we've learned in the last two years is that everybody wants things now, instantaneously in real time, it's no longer, oh, that's great to have that. No, I, as a consumer, I want that in business. I want that every company has to be a data company, but if organizations can't be able to extract insights from that data and make smart decisions on it in real time, they're going to be out of business. >>Absolutely. The ability to be able to process data at the time you're making a decision, the best data possible at that moment is critical in order for these companies, really, it's a, it's an ability for this company to thrive and even survive. >>Absolutely. Nobody's going to want one thing, I think we know nobody's going to want less data slot more slowly as time goes on. It's always going to be more data faster, faster, fastest. >>Absolutely. And that's why this model at Kupa has really been formulated over the last 12 years of how do we collect the data across our customer community? How do we pull it together, normalize it, aggregate it, anonymize it, and create insights that are so powerful. Like what we're just announcing now is our ocean freight pricing >>Index. >>So we've collected all of the data from our customers that are sourcing ocean freight and we're taking that data and we're creating a market index for the pricing of ocean freight. So now within Coupa, you can actually see what's happening the price of ocean freight, and we're going to continue to add more and more services. As more data gets processed to Hooper. >>Talk to me about the customer influence and your role. You talk with customers a lot. It used to be on the road a lot. Obviously that's changed. Hopefully that's coming back, but let's talk about one of the things I always know when I, when I come to inspire, I always know I'm going to see a lot of customer logos. I'm going to feel a lot. And on the cube here from the voice of Coupa's customer, talk to me about some of the influence that your customers have been able to have in the last two years alone. >>Absolutely. So our philosophy at Coupa's, uh, none of us is as smart as all of us. And it really is the DNA of this company, the heart of the company. So when the pandemic hit, we just really said to ourselves, okay, how do we continue that collaboration and now a digital world? And that's what we did. We just pivoted really fast into a digital world, but the same volume, the same collaboration, the same conversations were happening with our customer community. And in the last year alone, we probably had over 400 customers over 90% of the features we delivered had customer input into those features. And the model continues around our customers, collaborating with us via the digital channels and our product owners, really working with them as a co innovation team. And not as, you know, product in a ivory tower somewhere. >>I like the co-innovation kind of team part, but it's really what you're describing is that flywheel that you mentioned a few minutes ago, that's really always been there at Coupa for very, very long time. And it's just getting faster and more efficient. And I would say in a nerdy way more, data-driven >>More data, data, data. I will talk data all day long. It's just wonderful. And even this ocean freight thing, I'll tell everyone 10 years ago, this was the dream to have enough data, to be able to create these types of supply chain insights that are just unparalleled. And now as the data continues to increase the next year's insights and the year after are going to just keep improving because as the data increases, the insights get better and in different categories, different ways. >>So when you're in those customer conversations with customers who maybe prospects, I'll say who aren't yet Coupa customers who ha who say Donna, I've got a, we've got a huge data problem. Where do they start? How do you advise them to be able to overcome that? So they can use the data, glean the insights in real time and be competitive? >>You know, the first thing I always say to our customers or prospective customers is start the journey and have conversations with Coupa as a partner and not as a vendor, the more that we can work together and say, help us understand your technology architecture, help us understand your pain points. Where are the, where are the parts of your business that are critically damaged that need us to prioritize. And then let us have a discussion for you as a company that we can make recommendations you based on other customers that have been like you and have those same pain points and then lay it out from that point of view. But it's, it's hard when it's a very, you know, classic old model of we're procurement and you're a vendor and we're going to silo it because what we see is a >>Lot of, >>Well, this is how we used to do it. So we're only asking you questions around how we used to do it. And now how the rest of the, not about how the rest of the community is doing it. So my advice would really be open up the doors, have a conversation, start as a partner, and then let's figure it out from there. >>Well, one of the things that came across in Rob keynote this morning was about Cooper, about we've got to get rid of the silos. Every organization in every industry cannot operate in a silo. And even, even Barbara Corcoran's keynote when she was talking about some of the best ideas. In fact, I think I saw a tweet from her the other day that said she doesn't think she's ever had a really great idea. They've always come from basically collaborating within a group. So not in a silo. >>Absolutely collaboration is key in everything we do. We, none of us is as smart as all of us. And it truly is a key point in technology. These silos that are happening in business that prevents the risk from properly be operationalized. So for example, the risk team may be aware that there is a supplier that has now gone onto a government watch list. Okay? But the payments team is not aware. So the payments team is still issuing payments to that vendor or new orders are going to that vendor or sourcing events. Coupa brings those silos together and says, instead, we're going to employ what we call suite synergy. And we're going to stop the transactions when the risk is increased, routed to the risk team for review before the money goes out the door. >>And how does I love sweet synergy? How does that resonate? Who are you talking to within customers? Are you talking to the C-suite? How does suite synergy resonate that far up the stack? Because the concept is clear. >>Yeah. It's about the collaboration for more value and protecting the brand. The, what the people we speak to are generally the CFO, the CPO, the chief procurement officer and the CIO. Those are generally, um, who we speak to. But increasingly we see the chief sustainability officer, the chief diversity officer, and especially from a notion of how do I not just report on my data? How do I improve it? How do I impact diversity by helping the person, making a spend decisions, giving them diverse options at the time they're doing that spend decision, instead of just reporting on it, throw it, >>Grow it, act on it, take the insights and actually make smart decisions faster. >>Absolutely. And before the money goes out the door, once the money goes out the door, you cannot influence it to be going to a diverse supplier it's already done. >>Right. So I know we're only on day one here. Last question for you is what are its great turnout? All the people behind us. It's great to hear that buzz of, of a conference environment. Once again, what are some of the things that you've heard today that really excite you about the direction that Cooper's going in? >>I think for me, it all started today. And yesterday, yesterday we are a community advisory boards. We had hundreds of customers that were meeting with us and it was just the sense of co-innovation being alive and well. So many customers today, I sat next to ADM, uh, one of our customers and they're working with us on supply chain collaboration and the next generation of supply chain collaboration. And it was just so wonderful to finally meet the people that we've been working with for so long in a digital world. >>That's right. It's always nice. When you look at badges, I know you put video conferencing for two years. You're >>Taller than I thought >>Exactly. I don't get that. I don't get that. You're taller than other >>Taller. No, I'm pretty >>Sure it's been great. Having you on the program, talking about the strategy, the innovation, the direction coop is going and what you've witnessed, the evolution of it in the last 10 years, we congratulate you on your success. And we just look forward to seeing Kupa, continue to evolve and mature. >>Thank you so much. It was wonderful to sit down with you today. Excellent. >>Good. I enjoyed it too. For Donna wheelchairs. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Cooper inspire 22 from Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is and episode in the Remote Works Citrix virtual series. >> Hello everybody, my name is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this cube conversation. You know, for the last several weeks, we've been interviewing key executives to really try to understand how they're responding to the COVID-19 crisis. And one of the key areas that we've been reporting on is the so called work from home offset, and I'll explain that in a little bit. But there are two great executives from Citrix that I'm really pleased to have on Donna Kimmel is the Executive Vice President and Chief chief people officer. Donna, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> And she she's joined by Meerah Rajavel, who's the CIO of Citrix. Meerah, thank you as well. >> Thank you. >> So, I mean, this thing has been amazing. We've been doing a lot of research and it just obviously came out of the blue guys, if you would actually bring up that that chart. I want to set up the conversation here. This is something that we've been reporting on for a while. This is an ETR survey from about 1300 CIOs and IT practitioners that we asked them, how is your budget going to change in 2020 as a result of COVID? And you can see the red, we all know the story in the red, it's ugly. But surprisingly, about 35% of the respondents said no change. They're actually going to plow ahead. But what's even more surprising was 20 plus percent, about 21% said we're actually going to spend more. And so you can see from the data, that it's actually would be a lot worse, we're not for the green. Now, the reality is that green is a function really have worked from home infrastructure. And guys, that's something that I really want to talk to you about today. So, Donna, let me start with you. I mean, this is we're always talking about people, people process and technology. I mean, we went from put your toe in the water with work from home infrastructure, to all in. Your thoughts I mean, this is just overnight. >> Absolutely, you know, I think when I think about remote work and working from home, it is really not business as usual and probably was the biggest change that businesses have experienced, even in my career and many others. You know this was pretty much thrust upon us the work from home. And we realized that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving and operating. Our home offices quickly became kitchen tables and basements and bathrooms and bedrooms. And, in addition to it, not necessarily being set up the way that we would normally set it up if we knew we were going to work from home. It also didn't generally involve caring for family members at the same time. And so, most people thought for the first couple of weeks well, I can get through this. You know, for, it's not an extended period of time, but the reality is it's become an extended period of time. And I think ultimately, you know when we step back and think we're as humans, we're all survivors, and we're resilient. And there's a number of ways that, you know, we can help our employees as they make the adjustment that was really sort of pushed on them. >> Now, the executives that I've been talking to they, to a person start with, look, the safety and health of our team is the most important. So you obviously had to communicate that. Donna, I wonder if you could talk about sort of the priorities, you know what is it the cadence of your communication? The transparency of your communication? What really was your kind of first move, if you will? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think for us, one of the first things we had to step back and think about is, who are we what is what is our culture, what's important to us and we recognize it Citrix, it's our talent that makes the business successful. So we to show understand as much of the experience as possible that are that our employees are having, and really come at it from, I think a place of, of empathy. Listening to what's important to them, thinking about what's going to enable them to be successful because when our employees are successful, they truly drive success and a great experience for our customers. They're the ones out there helping to support our customers to support our sales partners, and certainly, ultimately, our communities. But when we think about this, we're thinking about the challenges, the opportunities, trying to develop plans and programs, and making sure that we have continuous information that is provided to our employees. And I think part of it you know we'll have an opportunity to talk with Meerah as well. When we step back, we think about kind of three things from a future of work perspective, we always think about the culture of the organization. Which is the embodiment of the values, the who we are and what we do. All of this clearly is grounded in the business objectives. So the first piece is our is our culture. The second piece is our physical space. So what is our environment like that enables us to be as productive as possible. And then the third piece is our digital space. If you can think about all of those almost as a Venn diagram, and that really puts the employee at the center. When we think about what's going to enable our employees to be successful, we think about that in a very holistic way. And so culture is sorry, did you want to-- >> Oh no please. >> Yeah. Culture for us is really grounded in our ability to drive trust in the organization. It's about that human connection. Because the more we can be connected with each other's managers to employees and peers to employees, the better off we are, people will feel less isolated. Because without that face to face, it makes it, and face to face and I'll say in person makes it a lot more difficult. The second piece that we focus on is that physical environment. And I think for many employees because they were thrust into the situation when they compare it to the work environment, when you're in the office, there's almost a professional feel, in that work environment and so employees feel a fair amount of pressure to try to create that same professionalism in their home. And the reality is, it's hard to do that. So it puts a lot of pressure on employees when they recognize that the whole family is quarantined with them, right? There's homeschooling going on. There's no childcare or eldercare. There's interruptions at inopportune times, barking dogs and cats walking across keyboards and family members doing drive-bys while the video cameras on and I think one of the things that we've been able to do is to help employees feel comfortable with that's who you are, that's our humanity. And the more we can help people feel comfortable about creating that physical space that's open and welcoming. That really helps drive that experience. And then the third piece, as I mentioned, is the digital space. And that's really where the partnership with Meerah comes in is so, so important, do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, you know as Meerah and I have talked that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFFs in order to drive variance to enable our employees to be as productive as possible in this work from home. >> All right, so Meerah, let's let's get into that. So once you've established the safety, the health of your your employees, obviously financial flexibility and runway and the like their physical digital space. Now, you're really under a microscope with the tech. Now, of course, Citrix has been in this business for decades. So you know a lot about this, but nonetheless, this is really new. You were thrust into it overnight. Your thoughts on on how you responded and you know kind of where we're at in that journey. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So one other thing Donna mentioned, right, the three aspects when we moved to work from home, the biggest piece of this aspect that made it like for example, she was telling, I mean, I myself, we are in transition. I'm moving from Austin, Texas to Florida when it is all in the middle. I'm right now in the middle of my transition, I'm not settled my new house. And literally I'm doing this interview with the sitting my laptop on top of cereal boxes right now. That's actually something that I empathize clearly with my employees. So the physical space when we are in an office location is not any more that we can control. So the digital space need to really compensate for the physical space. The culture is something I think we are very lucky being in Citrix, the notion of what we have been always been talking about remote work, and employee experience, we have got that ingrained. So when we have to go into this remote workspace, work force culture, the culture is something that I would say we had some foundation to stand on. But IT has to come in, it's not an easy job because we want to give people the ability to do they what they want to do in a productive fashion. But now digital need to compensate for the physical, you know efficiencies that are possibly lacking in a home environment. So I looked at it from three C's, right? It starts with connectivity, right? Connectivity being are we providing the right kind of connectivity, which is to a secure connection. At the end of the day my job here is to make the employee productive and secure at the same time. It's not just about the productivity, but also wrap it up with a greater experience. So we start looking at connectivity from a security point of view, from performance point of view, using you know technologies like SDVAN and maximizing their performance to the nearest, how we can, you know break out the circuits to maximize performance for our employees. We also need to take into account that there are countries we went into the last mile to understand where the true problem is. Because if you go to Asia, there are so many countries, you know even if we can provide superior experience, their experience is very dependent on the local connectivity. So we need to look at, okay, how do we ensure our heavy duty applications are in a way optimized so it doesn't become a productivity tip for the employee. The second is if you think about productivity for employees, and it's all about information sharing and content sharing, right? So I call the second C is the content. The ability for the employee to have the right data at the right place. So they can make decisions and they can be productive. So using things like whether it is your ShareFile or your OneDrive or your collaboration platform JIRA, it doesn't matter, but you have to really make sure that data and information are available. And we focused on making sure that we are streamlined that and communicating about that very vocally like to Donna's point. The third C we looked at was collaboration, right? I mean, that's actually where, we are now compensating for the physical touch with a digital touch. So that includes things like your audio conferencing platform, your video conferencing platform, your ability to bring these different facets together, right? I mean, the ability to share, a ability to whiteboard I had last week, three days off site, and it was a complete virtual off site with nine hours of working session. And we used all kinds of tools that literally we had digital stickies to move around that integrated into our video conferencing platform that integrated into our conference sharing platform. So whatever we are doing, these are all connected. At the end of the day I truly felt like you know what i can contribute to not you know adding to the carbon footprint of the globe, because we have people from all over the globe, all of a sudden, I'm getting feedback from employees saying now the playing field is completely level down, people who have been remote users before they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody's same. In fact, my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employees and say, hey, what is the tips that I can use from you to make sure I'm productive, right? So I see the culture aspect is super important. That's actually bringing us together, but it is from a technology and digital point of view, bringing your, you know connectivity, content and collaboration in a way that it's going to be secure and in a way that we are looking at it with the aspect of your culture and from the employee shoes is a super important thing from a technology point of view. >> So Donna, you mentioned the sort of BFF between between HR and IT now, of course, HR IT have always had a relationship but it really has been around that Human Capital Managers Software, whether it was simplified and efficient onboarding or certain, change management functions. What have you been able to learn from that relationship and apply and what's new? >> You know, I think, what we're doing together what Meerah and I and the IT in the HR organizations are really doing together is truly understanding what it means to enable productivity for employees. And when you think about having the right tools to enable employees to be productive, doing that in alignment with the culture of the organization, what is it that drives our sense of meaning and accomplishment? And then being able to do it in a way both in a physical environment whether that physical environment is in the office or if it is remote. We do Look collectively together at the change management, how do you get employees to adopt new ways of doing things? And utilize that and learn from it. So we experiment with certain types of productivity tools, as Meerah was, was talking about, which ones worked, which ones needed to change, what worked for some teams and didn't work for others, when she and I can do that together, and our departments can do that together that enables us to truly drive productivity across the organization. >> Yeah, I would probably add one more thing to what Donna said. I mean, one of the thing is, also if you think about it, you know the human resource, the talent organization has a much better understanding of the culture of the subcultures, right? I mean, I've never been in a company even when it's 1000 people company, you have subcultures. And HR is in involved in the culture of those subcultures as we are going through. From IT point of view, we look at it from user personas, okay? So a salesperson who's actually always on road or always like more of a remote worker versus an engineering person. I mean, we are a software company and R&D persona requires a different set of productivity tools, compared to a salesperson compared to an executive compared to an executive assistant, right? So for us, it's actually bringing that different functional line of business. And that type of personas. And HR is absolutely crucial because as we are looking at it, we're saying, hey, what is the success for this organization, and what's the culture of that organization and one of the primary job roles and we don't do just with HR but HR gives us so much you know content to get jumpstart, then when we engage with the real users, we are not going with a blank sheet of paper we are going with something that they can react to and they can add to it. So we are doing a design thinking with them with something they can begin start together rather than you know white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, he's asked, what do you want, you'll be getting, you know finding the sky on the moon. >> Well, it's a good thing you have those virtual stickies to help with that design thinking, right? You know, one of the things that I've been been saying is that, you know we've never seen obviously anything like this before a forced shutdown to the economy, which is why we're going to remember it. And like 911, you know post 911 we are going to see some things here that that have permanence, bad post GDPR for example, it required, certain changes. So, Donna, I want to begin start with you. Just it's ironic that, you know we're starting a new decade with this crisis. We're not just going to go back and revert the 2019 there's not just going to be some, you know all of a sudden, everything is rosy again, it's not. There's going to be certain permanent changes. How much have you thought about that? And do you have any visibility on what those are going to be? >> Yeah, you know when I stepped back and I think about this, and I think a large part of it has to do with much of what Meerah was just talking about in terms of design thinking. It's really, I think, for all of us, it's coming back to recognize that this became almost a forced opportunity to focus on business continuity. And how do we think about what's right for us as we move forward? But the design of that is based on what is right? What's the context for that particular business? What's the culture of that organization? What are the products and services that, you know that business provides? What are the subcultures in the organization? So, for me, it really does step back to say, look, we need to focus on business continuity. And now we have a couple of new models where you know in the past, it would be really easy for managers to say, you know I don't think my team can work remotely or your job isn't possible to do remotely. And now what we're finding in many businesses is that many jobs can actually be done remotely if they're provided the right tools and the right resources. So for me it, I step back and say, as we think about the business continuity going forward, there is a new way to work. It is a combination of finding that flexibility between working in the office and remote work and providing the right tools that enable employees to be able to do it successfully. >> You know, Meerah, this notion that Don is bringing up of business continuance, I've sort of been noodling on this and thinking that going forward, one of the things that will change is that companies might be willing to sub optimize near term performance to put in better business resiliency. Now at the same time, I know how CEOs thing and they say, okay great, we're going to make that investment. Yeah, fine. We'll maybe sacrifice some short term performance, but I had a really interesting conversation recently with a chief data officer said you don't have to sacrifice necessarily, with with data in this new era, there actually are ways in which you can both drive business resilience and drive productivity and ultimately profitability. What's your thinking on on that sort of imbalance or balance, if you will? >> I agree with that statement. Because to me, you know today's business we need to look at I mean, especially with the cloud and some of the new technologies that we have, I mean, even I see this thing coming out of COVID there's going to be industries that are going to come out new business models that are going to emerge, right? I mean, think about telemedicine, we have been very, very hesitant about telemedicine for decades now. I mean, that's not a new concept, but we have been very hesitant. we said, I have to see the doctor. But today, pretty much everybody except for if you're seriously injured, you're getting telemedicine. That industry is going to work, right? So to me the statement you made is absolutely, absolutely, and for me, it's actually an opportunity coming out of an adversity that's going to come out. When I think about it, the most important thing I see is the businesses that are going to be successful. That's why even HR, you know partnership is even more greater. The businesses that has talent with digital dexterity are the ones that are going to win, right? I mean, regardless, you know whether you're in HR, whether you're in finance, whether you're in IT, you're in R&D, you're in manufacturing doesn't matter. Your digital dexterity of your company really makes you whether you win in the market, or you're you're one of those dinosaurs in the market, right? And how do you bring those together? That's a cultural change. That's actually educating, right? I mean, we don't want to leave, we already have talent shortage, and we don't want Want to leave a generation of population behind and focused on only the millennials and others because I mean, recently I've been going through the scaled agile framework, which is a lean agile and I really love the word of lean agile, lean has a lot of economies of scale. Agile brings a lot of agility. When you bring them together, you get both. And that's exactly what we need to do with our talent, bring the vision and bring this digital dexterity that we need to bring there. How we get it from a productivity? Of course, we want to be respectful of privacy. But as we have been going through we have been looking at different productivity metrics looking at, you know what is the usage pattern of our employees, how much code checking they've done? How was my MTTR being, I mean, in my organization, I've been looking at the velocity of our transaction processing and our issue resolution SLA times. And we also even, you know had a little because I think at the end of the day, we human we actually We are social animals, we need that patch. And we cannot forget, we are not mechanical, we are human. So we need that empathy and we need that emotional side of it. So we have been both qualitatively and quantitatively checking with our workforce, how they're feeling about it, and also looking at the data to see if the productivity is telling the story, what people are talking about. And to our surprise, you know 66% of our population, when we did this pulse survey said, they feel more productive in this situation, because many of them commented that, you know the time they save from not commuting, or the feel, just the sense of spending a little bit more time with the family is actually giving them that extra boost. And they can really do a work life integration, not like a work life balance they need to do. And we also heard about 11% felt pretty much they're in the same range. And but I also want to recognize it's not for everyone, right? I mean, we do have folks who are in manufacturing, they need to patch the physical things. And those jobs in certain days need to be, more physical. So there's about 3-5%, depending on your job function said, you know what I need access to the lab because I really deal with changing my connectivity, changing my or a dislike for the customer, I'm repairing their board, I really need to see that, those are the ones where we find kind of, you know absolute physical touch is required. >> You know, in a way, I mean, we're kind of lucky in the technology business talk about the digital transformation. I've been saying this is going to accelerate a lot of digital transformations. But for us, you look at the Cube, we've been up remote studios, no problem. You're a software company, you've already really transitioned largely to a subscription model so you can code remotely, but there are some industries in particular industries, where you guys sell a lot of product, I think about healthcare, you mentioned telemedicine, Meerah, financial services, defense, big users of VDI, they're highly regulated and secure industries. And while it's not, you know your main thrust, you talk to your peers and in those industries. So, and I've always said, you know some of these industries really haven't digitally transformed, they're actually kind of complacent. My feeling is that this is going to really accelerate, you know some of those-- >> Absolutely. Industries that haven't transformed and haven't been disrupted. I wonder if you could both comment from both a technology perspective and a people perspective. >> You know, I think, I think from the people perspective, it's really about mindset. And it and recognizing that how we approach these new problems and needs new ways of thinking about getting work done, is all about what our minds block us from thinking. And this pushed us into a situation where we've been able to demonstrate roles that we did not think could ever be done remotely, can actually be done remotely. And so for me, it is about a mindset shift. It's about enabling the dialogue sort of having the courage to have that dialogue inside of the organization to understand, again, what's the business context? What can we do in a more flexible way? And how do we continue to serve our customers the best that we can? >> I think for me, it comes down to you know protection is always an extinction, right? I mean, if you're trying to protect a current model, and if you're trying to be saying, you know, you don't want to be the dinosaur. Things are going to change and being proactive about the change and embracing the change will let you to some extent influence and control that change versus being the change being done to you. In this particular case, to me looking at it to see especially with today's technology around, you know manufacturing industry is probably going to see a lot of remote hands as well with IoT and robotics coming in. And I see that is going to be one area, you may see a drip down on type of talent that's getting extinct. On the other side, we are going to continue to see the demand on technology is going to continue to go up and especially which is already shortage. I mean, if I remember the last survey from KPMG, in December, the CIO survey said 60% of the CIOs responded, they are having challenges with the you know filling the roles and I also remember the other one is around Korn Ferry survey of technology talent shortage. By 2030, the expectation is we're going to leave around 8.7 billion or $7 trillion of revenue on the table and 85% will be unfulfilled. I mean, this is a time for, you know really how do you ensure there are industries that are going to transform which means there are certain skills, people need to reskill. I mean, even in technology that reskill and upskill is going to be a constant thing that's actually it's nobody is there, you know spark from that one, in my opinion in today's world. so that reskill and upskill is going to be the ones who are going to embrace that they're going to be in a bigger way and taking advantage of these transitions and transformations. I also think there are areas that we may see what we call the hype may have a broader adoption. So you'd mentioned about the chief data officer talking about how data can come in, I mean, I see automation accelerating and data is going to be a core component of acceleration. And you will see more and more you know things around how measurements becomes important as a start that leads to you know more data modeling that leads to more automation, that cycle is going to accelerate the influence of AI is going to accelerate even further than when we have said. I mean, I just wish some of the areas where, you know we have been slow in that option if you would have accelerated some of the challenges we are dealing with now with capacity, we wouldn't have been having problems. I mean, then I did a reflection with my team. The one of the highest one ranked by my leadership was we should have accelerated accelerated automation more. >> Well, I think what are some really, really interesting and deep points, but really no industry is safe, from disruption and in really Meerah to your points. If you're just paving the cow path, you're going to be in trouble. If you're trying to protect the past from the future, you're going to get disrupted. And I feel like you guys really have a good handle on this. And it's our pleasure to be able to post an interview such experts like yourselves, really appreciate you sharing your insights and your experience with with our audience. I mean, we're kind of all in this together. So thank you, Donna, Meerah, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. For my CXO series we will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, this is a Citrix Virtual Series examining the realities of a remote work world. >> Hello everybody, my name is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this cube conversation. You know, for the last several weeks, we've been interviewing key executives to really try to understand how they're responding to the COVID-19 crisis. And one of the key areas that we've been reporting on is the so called work from home offset, and I'll explain that in a little bit. But there are two great executives from Citrix that I'm really pleased to have on Donna Kimmel is the Executive Vice President and Chief chief people officer. Donna, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> And she she's joined by Meerah Rajavel, who's the CIO of Citrix. Meerah, thank you as well. >> Thank you. >> So, I mean, this thing has been amazing. We've been doing a lot of research and it just obviously came out of the blue guys, if you would actually bring up that that chart. I want to set up the conversation here. This is something that we've been reporting on for a while. This is an ETR survey from about 1300 CIOs and IT practitioners that we asked them, how is your budget going to change in 2020 as a result of COVID? And you can see the red, we all know the story in the red, it's ugly. But surprisingly, about 35% of the respondents said no change. They're actually going to plow ahead. But what's even more surprising was 20 plus percent, about 21% said we're actually going to spend more. And so you can see from the data, that it's actually would be a lot worse, we're not for the green. Now, the reality is that green is a function really have worked from home infrastructure. And guys, that's something that I really want to talk to you about today. So, Donna, let me start with you. I mean, this is we're always talking about people, people process and technology. I mean, we went from put your toe in the water with work from home infrastructure, to all in. Your thoughts I mean, this is just overnight. >> Absolutely, you know, I think when I think about remote work and working from home, it is really not business as usual and probably was the biggest change that businesses have experienced, even in my career and many others. You know this was pretty much thrust upon us the work from home. And we realized that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving and operating. Our home offices quickly became kitchen tables and basements and bathrooms and bedrooms. And, in addition to it, not necessarily being set up the way that we would normally set it up if we knew we were going to work from home. It also didn't generally involve caring for family members at the same time. And so, most people thought for the first couple of weeks well, I can get through this. You know, for, it's not an extended period of time, but the reality is it's become an extended period of time. And I think ultimately, you know when we step back and think we're as humans, we're all survivors, and we're resilient. And there's a number of ways that, you know, we can help our employees as they make the adjustment that was really sort of pushed on them. >> Now, the executives that I've been talking to they, to a person start with, look, the safety and health of our team is the most important. So you obviously had to communicate that. Donna, I wonder if you could talk about sort of the priorities, you know what is it the cadence of your communication? The transparency of your communication? What really was your kind of first move, if you will? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think for us, one of the first things we had to step back and think about is, who are we what is what is our culture, what's important to us and we recognize it Citrix, it's our talent that makes the business successful. So we to show understand as much of the experience as possible that are that our employees are having, and really come at it from, I think a place of, of empathy. Listening to what's important to them, thinking about what's going to enable them to be successful because when our employees are successful, they truly drive success and a great experience for our customers. They're the ones out there helping to support our customers to support our sales partners, and certainly, ultimately, our communities. But when we think about this, we're thinking about the challenges, the opportunities, trying to develop plans and programs, and making sure that we have continuous information that is provided to our employees. And I think part of it you know we'll have an opportunity to talk with Meerah as well. When we step back, we think about kind of three things from a future of work perspective, we always think about the culture of the organization. Which is the embodiment of the values, the who we are and what we do. All of this clearly is grounded in the business objectives. So the first piece is our is our culture. The second piece is our physical space. So what is our environment like that enables us to be as productive as possible. And then the third piece is our digital space. If you can think about all of those almost as a Venn diagram, and that really puts the employee at the center. When we think about what's going to enable our employees to be successful, we think about that in a very holistic way. And so culture is sorry, did you want to-- >> Oh no please. >> Yeah. Culture for us is really grounded in our ability to drive trust in the organization. It's about that human connection. Because the more we can be connected with each other's managers to employees and peers to employees, the better off we are, people will feel less isolated. Because without that face to face, it makes it, and face to face and I'll say in person makes it a lot more difficult. The second piece that we focus on is that physical environment. And I think for many employees because they were thrust into the situation when they compare it to the work environment, when you're in the office, there's almost a professional feel, in that work environment and so employees feel a fair amount of pressure to try to create that same professionalism in their home. And the reality is, it's hard to do that. So it puts a lot of pressure on employees when they recognize that the whole family is quarantined with them, right? There's homeschooling going on. There's no childcare or eldercare. There's interruptions at inopportune times, barking dogs and cats walking across keyboards and family members doing drive-bys while the video cameras on and I think one of the things that we've been able to do is to help employees feel comfortable with that's who you are, that's our humanity. And the more we can help people feel comfortable about creating that physical space that's open and welcoming. That really helps drive that experience. And then the third piece, as I mentioned, is the digital space. And that's really where the partnership with Meerah comes in is so, so important, do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, you know as Meerah and I have talked that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFFs in order to drive variance to enable our employees to be as productive as possible in this work from home. >> All right, so Meerah, let's let's get into that. So once you've established the safety, the health of your your employees, obviously financial flexibility and runway and the like their physical digital space. Now, you're really under a microscope with the tech. Now, of course, Citrix has been in this business for decades. So you know a lot about this, but nonetheless, this is really new. You were thrust into it overnight. Your thoughts on on how you responded and you know kind of where we're at in that journey. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So one other thing Donna mentioned, right, the three aspects when we moved to work from home, the biggest piece of this aspect that made it like for example, she was telling, I mean, I myself, we are in transition. I'm moving from Austin, Texas to Florida when it is all in the middle. I'm right now in the middle of my transition, I'm not settled my new house. And literally I'm doing this interview with the sitting my laptop on top of cereal boxes right now. That's actually something that I empathize clearly with my employees. So the physical space when we are in an office location is not any more that we can control. So the digital space need to really compensate for the physical space. The culture is something I think we are very lucky being in Citrix, the notion of what we have been always been talking about remote work, and employee experience, we have got that ingrained. So when we have to go into this remote workspace, work force culture, the culture is something that I would say we had some foundation to stand on. But IT has to come in, it's not an easy job because we want to give people the ability to do they what they want to do in a productive fashion. But now digital need to compensate for the physical, you know efficiencies that are possibly lacking in a home environment. So I looked at it from three C's, right? It starts with connectivity, right? Connectivity being are we providing the right kind of connectivity, which is to a secure connection. At the end of the day my job here is to make the employee productive and secure at the same time. It's not just about the productivity, but also wrap it up with a greater experience. So we start looking at connectivity from a security point of view, from performance point of view, using you know technologies like SDVAN and maximizing their performance to the nearest, how we can, you know break out the circuits to maximize performance for our employees. We also need to take into account that there are countries we went into the last mile to understand where the true problem is. Because if you go to Asia, there are so many countries, you know even if we can provide superior experience, their experience is very dependent on the local connectivity. So we need to look at, okay, how do we ensure our heavy duty applications are in a way optimized so it doesn't become a productivity tip for the employee. The second is if you think about productivity for employees, and it's all about information sharing and content sharing, right? So I call the second C is the content. The ability for the employee to have the right data at the right place. So they can make decisions and they can be productive. So using things like whether it is your ShareFile or your OneDrive or your collaboration platform JIRA, it doesn't matter, but you have to really make sure that data and information are available. And we focused on making sure that we are streamlined that and communicating about that very vocally like to Donna's point. The third C we looked at was collaboration, right? I mean, that's actually where, we are now compensating for the physical touch with a digital touch. So that includes things like your audio conferencing platform, your video conferencing platform, your ability to bring these different facets together, right? I mean, the ability to share, a ability to whiteboard I had last week, three days off site, and it was a complete virtual off site with nine hours of working session. And we used all kinds of tools that literally we had digital stickies to move around that integrated into our video conferencing platform that integrated into our conference sharing platform. So whatever we are doing, these are all connected. And the end of the day I truly felt like you know what i can contribute to not you know adding to the carbon footprint of the globe, because we have people from all over the globe, all of a sudden, I'm getting feedback from employees saying now the playing field is completely level down, people who have been remote users before they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody's same. In fact, my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employees and say, hey, what is the tips that I can use from you to make sure I'm productive, right? So I see the culture aspect is super important. That's actually bringing us together, but it is from a technology and digital point of view, bringing your, you know connectivity, content and collaboration in a way that it's going to be secure and in a way that we are looking at it with the aspect of your culture and from the employee shoes is a super important thing from a technology point. >> So Donna, you mentioned the sort of BFF between between HR and IT now, of course, HR IT have always had a relationship but it really has been around that Human Capital Managers Software, whether it was simplified and efficient onboarding or certain, change management functions. What have you been able to learn from that relationship and apply and what's new? >> You know, I think, what we're doing together what Meerah and I and the IT in the HR organizations are really doing together is truly understanding what it means to enable productivity for employees. And when you think about having the right tools to enable employees to be productive, doing that in alignment with the culture of the organization, what is it that drives our sense of meaning and accomplishment? And then being able to do it in a way both in a physical environment whether that physical environment is in the office or if it is remote. We do Look collectively together at the change management, how do you get employees to adopt new ways of doing things? And utilize that and learn from it. So we experiment with certain types of productivity tools, as Meerah was, was talking about, which ones worked, which ones needed to change, what worked for some teams and didn't work for others, when she and I can do that together, and our departments can do that together that enables us to truly drive productivity across the organization. >> Yeah, I would probably add one more thing to what Donna said. I mean, one of the thing is, also if you think about it, you know the human resource, the talent organization has a much better understanding of the culture of the subcultures, right? I mean, I've never been in a company even when it's 1000 people company, you have subcultures. And HR is in involved in the culture of those subcultures as we are going through. From IT point of view, we look at it from user personas, okay? So a salesperson who's actually always on road or always like more of a remote worker versus an engineering person. I mean, we are a software company and R&D persona requires a different set of productivity tools, compared to a salesperson compared to an executive compared to an executive assistant, right? So for us, it's actually bringing that different functional line of business. And that type of personas. And HR is absolutely crucial because as we are looking at it, we're saying, hey, what is the success for this organization, and what's the culture of that organization and one of the primary job roles and we don't do just with HR but HR gives us so much you know content to get jumpstart, then when we engage with the real users, we are not going with a blank sheet of paper we are going with something that they can react to and they can add to it. So we are doing a design thinking with them with something they can begin start together rather than you know white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, he's asked, what do you want, you'll be getting, you know finding the sky on the moon. >> Well, it's a good thing you have those virtual stickies to help with that design thinking, right? You know, one of the things that I've been been saying is that, you know we've never seen obviously anything like this before a forced shutdown to the economy, which is why we're going to remember it. And like 911, you know post 911 we are going to see some things here that that have permanence, bad post GDPR for example, it required, certain changes. So, Donna, I want to begin start with you. Just it's ironic that, you know we're starting a new decade with this crisis. We're not just going to go back and revert the 2019 there's not just going to be some, you know all of a sudden, everything is rosy again, it's not. There's going to be certain permanent changes. How much have you thought about that? And do you have any visibility on what those are going to be? >> Yeah, you know when I stepped back and I think about this, and I think a large part of it has to do with much of what Meerah was just talking about in terms of design thinking. It's really, I think, for all of us, it's coming back to recognize that this became almost a forced opportunity to focus on business continuity. And how do we think about what's right for us as we move forward? But the design of that is based on what is right? What's the context for that particular business? What's the culture of that organization? What are the products and services that, you know that business provides? What are the subcultures in the organization? So, for me, it really does step back to say, look, we need to focus on business continuity. And now we have a couple of new models where you know in the past, it would be really easy for managers to say, you know I don't think my team can work remotely or your job isn't possible to do remotely. And now what we're finding in many businesses is that many jobs can actually be done remotely if they're provided the right tools and the right resources. So for me it, I step back and say, as we think about the business continuity going forward, there is a new way to work. It is a combination of finding that flexibility between working in the office and remote work and providing the right tools that enable employees to be able to do it successfully. >> You know, Meerah, this notion that Don is bringing up of business continuance, I've sort of been noodling on this and thinking that going forward, one of the things that will change is that companies might be willing to sub optimize near term performance to put in better business resiliency. Now at the same time, I know how CEOs thing and they say, okay great, we're going to make that investment. Yeah, fine. We'll maybe sacrifice some short term performance, but I had a really interesting conversation recently with a chief data officer said you don't have to sacrifice necessarily, with with data in this new era, there actually are ways in which you can both drive business resilience and drive productivity and ultimately profitability. What's your thinking on on that sort of imbalance or balance, if you will? >> I agree with that statement. Because to me, you know today's business we need to look at I mean, especially with the cloud and some of the new technologies that we have, I mean, even I see this thing coming out of COVID there's going to be industries that are going to come out new business models that are going to emerge, right? I mean, think about telemedicine, we have been very, very hesitant about telemedicine for decades now. I mean, that's not a new concept, but we have been very hesitant. we said, I have to see the doctor. But today, pretty much everybody except for if you're seriously injured, you're getting telemedicine. That industry is going to work, right? So to me the statement you made is absolutely, absolutely, and for me, it's actually an opportunity coming out of an adversity that's going to come out. When I think about it, the most important thing I see is the businesses that are going to be successful. That's why even HR, you know partnership is even more greater. The businesses that has talent with digital dexterity are the ones that are going to win, right? I mean, regardless, you know whether you're in HR, whether you're in finance, whether you're in IT, you're in R&D, you're in manufacturing doesn't matter. Your digital dexterity of your company really makes you whether you win in the market, or you're you're one of those dinosaurs in the market, right? And how do you bring those together? That's a cultural change. That's actually educating, right? I mean, we don't want to leave, we already have talent shortage, and we don't want Want to leave a generation of population behind and focused on only the millennials and others because I mean, recently I've been going through the scaled agile framework, which is a lean agile and I really love the word of lean agile, lean has a lot of economies of scale. Agile brings a lot of agility. When you bring them together, you get both. And that's exactly what we need to do with our talent, bring the vision and bring this digital dexterity that we need to bring there. How we get it from a productivity? Of course, we want to be respectful of privacy. But as we have been going through we have been looking at different productivity metrics looking at, you know what is the usage pattern of our employees, how much code checking they've done? How was my MTTR being, I mean, in my organization, I've been looking at the velocity of our transaction processing and our issue resolution SLA times. And we also even, you know had a little because I think at the end of the day, we human we actually We are social animals, we need that patch. And we cannot forget, we are not mechanical, we are human. So we need that empathy and we need that emotional side of it. So we have been both qualitatively and quantitatively checking with our workforce, how they're feeling about it, and also looking at the data to see if the productivity is telling the story, what people are talking about. And to our surprise, you know 66% of our population, when we did this pulse survey said, they feel more productive in this situation, because many of them commented that, you know the time they save from not commuting, or the feel, just the sense of spending a little bit more time with the family is actually giving them that extra boost. And they can really do a work life integration, not like a work life balance they need to do. And we also heard about 11% felt pretty much they're in the same range. And but I also want to recognize it's not for everyone, right? I mean, we do have folks who are in manufacturing, they need to patch the physical things. And those jobs in certain days need to be, more physical. So there's about 3-5%, depending on your job function said, you know what I need access to the lab because I really deal with changing my connectivity, changing my or a dislike for the customer, I'm repairing their board, I really need to see that, those are the ones where we find kind of, you know absolute physical touch is required. >> You know, in a way, I mean, we're kind of lucky in the technology business talk about the digital transformation. I've been saying this is going to accelerate a lot of digital transformations. But for us, you look at the Cube, we've been up remote studios, no problem. You're a software company, you've already really transitioned largely to a subscription model so you can code remotely, but there are some industries in particular industries, where you guys sell a lot of product, I think about healthcare, you mentioned telemedicine, Meerah, financial services, defense, big users of VDI, they're highly regulated and secure industries. And while it's not, you know your main thrust, you talk to your peers and in those industries. So, and I've always said, you know some of these industries really haven't digitally transformed, they're actually kind of complacent. My feeling is that this is going to really accelerate, you know some of those-- >> Absolutely. Industries that haven't transformed and haven't been disrupted. I wonder if you could both comment from both a technology perspective and a people perspective. >> You know, I think, I think from the people perspective, it's really about mindset. And it and recognizing that how we approach these new problems and needs new ways of thinking about getting work done, is all about what our minds block us from thinking. And this pushed us into a situation where we've been able to demonstrate roles that we did not think could ever be done remotely, can actually be done remotely. And so for me, it is about a mindset shift. It's about enabling the dialogue sort of having the courage to have that dialogue inside of the organization to understand, again, what's the business context? What can we do in a more flexible way? And how do we continue to serve our customers the best that we can? >> I think for me, it comes down to you know protection is always an extinction, right? I mean, if you're trying to protect a current model, and if you're trying to be saying, you know, you don't want to be the dinosaur. Things are going to change and being proactive about the change and embracing the change will let you to some extent influence and control that change versus being the change being done to you. In this particular case, to me looking at it to see especially with today's technology around, you know manufacturing industry is probably going to see a lot of remote hands as well with IoT and robotics coming in. And I see that is going to be one area, you may see a drip down on type of talent that's getting extinct. On the other side, we are going to continue to see the demand on technology is going to continue to go up and especially which is already shortage. I mean, if I remember the last survey from KPMG, in December, the CIO survey said 60% of the CIOs responded, they are having challenges with the you know filling the roles and I also remember the other one is around Korn Ferry survey of technology talent shortage. By 2030, the expectation is we're going to leave around 8.7 billion or $7 trillion of revenue on the table and 85% will be unfulfilled. I mean, this is a time for, you know really how do you ensure there are industries that are going to transform which means there are certain skills, people need to reskill. I mean, even in technology that reskill and upskill is going to be a constant thing that's actually it's nobody is there, you know spark from that one, in my opinion in today's world. so that reskill and upskill is going to be the ones who are going to embrace that they're going to be in a bigger way and taking advantage of these transitions and transformations. I also think there are areas that we may see what we call the hype may have a broader adoption. So you'd mentioned about the chief data officer talking about how data can come in, I mean, I see automation accelerating and data is going to be a core component of acceleration. And you will see more and more you know things around how measurements becomes important as a start that leads to you know more data modeling that leads to more automation, that cycle is going to accelerate the influence of AI is going to accelerate even further than when we have said. I mean, I just wish some of the areas where, you know we have been slow in that option if you would have accelerated some of the challenges we are dealing with now with capacity, we wouldn't have been having problems. I mean, then I did a reflection with my team. The one of the highest one ranked by my leadership was we should have accelerated accelerated automation more. >> Well, I think what are some really, really interesting and deep points, but really no industry is safe, from disruption and in really Meerah to your points. If you're just paving the cow path, you're going to be in trouble. If you're trying to protect the past from the future, you're going to get disrupted. And I feel like you guys really have a good handle on this. And it's our pleasure to be able to post an interview such experts like yourselves, really appreciate you sharing your insights and your experience with with our audience. I mean, we're kind of all in this together. So thank you, Donna, Meerah, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. For my CXO series we will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody, my name is Dave Vellante welcome to this CUBE conversation. You know for the last several weeks, we've been interviewing key executives to really try to understand how they're responding to the COVID-19 crisis. And one of the key areas that we've been reporting on is the so-called work from home offset. And I'll explain that in a little bit, but there are two great executives from Citrix that I'm really please to have on. Donna Kimmel, the Executive Vice-President and Chief People Officer. Donna, great to see ya', thanks for comin' on. >> Thank you. >> And she's joined by Meerah Rajavel who's the CIO of Citrix. Meerah, thank you as well. >> Thank you. >> So I mean this thing, it's been amazing. We've been doing a lot of research and it just obviously came out of the blue. Guys, if you would actually bring up that chart, I want to sort of set up the conversation here. This is something that we've been reporting on for a while. This is an ETR survey from about 1300 CIO's and IT practitioners that, we asked them how is your budget going to change in 2020 as a result of COVID? And you can see the red. We all know the story in the red, it's ugly. But surprisingly about 35% of the respondents said, no change. They're actually going to plow ahead, but what's even more surprising was 20 plus percent, about 21% said, we're actually going to spend more. And so you can see from the data that it's actually would be a lot worse were it not for the green. Now the reality is, that green is a function really of work from home infrastructure and guys that's something that I really want to talk to you about today. So, Donna let me start with you. I mean we always talk about people, process and technology. I mean we went from put your toe in the water with work from home infrastructure to all in. (chuckles) Your thoughts, I mean this is just overnight. >> Absolutely. You know I think when I think about remote work and working from home, it is really not business as usual. And probably was the biggest change that businesses have experienced, even in my career and many others. This was pretty much thrust upon us, the work from home. And we realize that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving and operating. Our home offices quickly became kitchen tables and basements and bathrooms and bedrooms. And in addition to it not neccesarily being setup the way we would normally set it up if we knew we were going to work from home. It also didn't generally involve caring for family members at the same time. And so most people thought for the first couple of weeks, well I can get through this you know for it's not an extended period of time, but the reality it's become an extended period of time. And I think ultimately, you know when we step back and think we're, as humans, we're all survivors and we're resilient. And there's a number of ways that we can help our employees as they make the adjustment that was really sort of pushed on them. >> Now, the executives that I've been talking to, they to a person start with look, the safety and health of our team is the most important. So you obviously had to communicate that, Donna. I wonder if you could talk about sort of the priorities, how you, you know what is it the cadence of your communication, the transparency of your communication, what really was your, sort of first move if you will? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think for us, one of the first things we had to step back and think about is, who are we, what is our culture, what's important to us? And we recognize at Citrix, that it's our talent that makes the business successful, so we need to show, understand as much of the experience as possible that our employees are having. And really come at it from, I think a place of empathy. Listening to what's important to them, thinking about what's going to enable them to be successful. Because when are employees are successful, they truly drive success and a great experience for our customers. They're the ones out there helping to support our customers to support our sales partners, and certainly ultimately our community. But when we think about this, we're thinking about the challenges, the opportunities, trying to developing plans and programs and making sure that we have continuous information that is provided to our employees. And I think part of it, we'll have an opportunity to talk with Meerah as well. When we step back, we think about kind of three things from a future of work perspective. We always think about the culture of the organization, which is the embodiment of the values, the who we are and what we do. All of this clearly is grounded in the business objectives. So the first piece is our culture. The second piece is our physical space. So what is our environment like that enables us to be as productive as possible? And then the third piece is our digital space. If you can think about all of those almost as a Venn diagram, that really puts the employee at the center. When we think about what's going to enable our employees to be successful, we think about that in a very holistic way. And so, culture is, sorry did you want to, I'm, >> Oh no, please, keep on talking, go ahead. >> Yeah, I was just going to say culture for us is really grounded in our ability to drive trust in the organization. It's about that human connection. Because the more we can be connected with each other as managers to employees and peers to employees, the better off we are. People will feel less isolated, because without that face to face it makes it, and face to face and I'll say in person makes it a lot more difficult. The second piece that we focus on is that physical environment. And I think for many employees, because they were thrust into the situation. When they compare it to the work environment, when you're in the office there's almost a professional feel, in that work environment. And so employees feel a fair amount of pressure to try to create that same professionalism at their home. And the reality is, it's hard to do that. So it puts a lot of pressure on employees when they recognize that the whole family is quarantined with them. Right there's home schooling going on, there's no child care or elder care, there's interruptions at inopportune times, barking dogs and cats walking across keyboards and family members doing drive-bys while the video camera's on. And I think one of the things that we've been able to do is to help employees feel comfortable with, that's who you are, that's our humanity. And the more we can help people feel comfortable about creating that physical space that's open and welcoming, that really helps drive that experience. And then the third piece as I mentioned, is the digital space. And that's really where the partnership with Meerah comes in and is so, so important. Do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, you know as Meerah and I have talked that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFF. In order to drive the right experience to enable our employees to be as productive as possible in this work from home. >> All right, so Meerah let's get into that. So once you've established though the self, the safety, the health, of your employees obviously financial flexibility, and Runway and the like, their physical digital space. Now you're really under a microscope with the tech. Now, of course Citrix has been in this business for decades. So you know a lot about this, but nonetheless, this is really new. You were thrust into it overnight. Your thoughts on how you responded and you know kind of where we're at in that journey. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So one of the things Donna mentioned right, the three aspects. When we move to work from home the biggest piece of this aspect that made it, like for example she was telling, like myself, we are in transition. I'm moving from Austin, Texas to Florida when it is all in the middle, I'm right now in the middle of my transition, I'm not settled in my new house and literally I'm doing this interview with the, sitting my laptop on top of cereal boxes, right now. That's actually something that I empathize clearly with my employees. So the physical space, when you are in an office location it's not anymore that we can control. So the digital space needs to really compensate for the physical space. The culture is something, I think we are very lucky being in Citrix, the notion of what we have always been talking about remote work and employee experience, we have got that ingrained so when we have to go into this remote work space in a work force culture, the culture is something that I would say we had some foundation to stand on. But IT has to come in. It's not an easy job, because we want to give people the ability to do what they want in a productive fashion, but now digital needs to compensate for the physical, you know efficiency that are possibly lacking in a home environment. So I looked at it from three C's. It starts with connectivity, right. Connectivity being, are we providing the right kind of connectivity which is through a secure connection. At the end of the day, my job here is to make the employee productive and secure at the same time. It's not just about the productivity, but wrap it up with the greater experience. So we start looking at connectivity from a security point of view, from a performance point of view, using technologies like Sdram and maximizing their performance to their nearest, how we can break out the security to maximize performance for our employees. We also need to take into account that there are countries we went into the last way understand where the true problem, because if you go to Asia, there are so many countries, you know even if we can provide experience, they're experience is very dependent on the local connectivity. So we need to look at, okay how do we ensure our heavy duty applications are in a very optimized so it doesn't become a productivity hit for the employee. The second is you think about productivity for employees, and it's all about information sharing and content sharing right. So I call the second C is the content. The ability for the employee to have the right data, the right place and so they can make decisions and they can be productive. So using things like, whether it is your share file or your OneDrive or your vision platform, G-Drive, it doesn't matter, but you have to really make sure the data and information are available and be focused on making sure that they are streamlined and communicating about that very openly, like to Donna's point. The third C we looked at was collaboration, right. I mean that's actually with, you know we are now compensating for the physical touch with a digital touch. So that includes things like your audio conferencing platform, your videoconferencing platform, your ability to bring these different facets together right. I mean the ability to share, the ability to white board. I had last week, three days offsite and it was a complete virtual offsite with nine hours of working sessions and we used all kinds of tools that literally we had digital sticky's to move around that integrated into our videoconferencing platform that integrated into our conference sharing platform. So that whatever they are doing, those are all connected. At the end of the day, I truly felt like you know what? I can contribute to not adding to the carbon footprint of the globe. Because truly we had people from all over the globe, all of us set in. I'm getting feedback from employees saying, now the playing field is completely leveled down. People who were being remote users before, they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody's same, in fact my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employee and say, "Hey what is some tips that I can use from you "to make sure I'm productive, right?" So I see the culture aspect is super important that's actually bringing us together, but it is from a technology and digital point of view, bringing your you know connectivity, content and collaboration in a way that it's going to be secure and innovative. We are looking at it with the aspect of your culture and from the employee shoes is a super important thing from a technology point of view. >> So Donna you mentioned the sort of BFF between HR and IT. Now of course, HR and IT have always had a relationship, but it really has been around, like you know Human Capital Management software, whether it was simplified and efficient, onboarding, or certain you know change management functions. What have you been able to learn from that relationship and apply and what's new? >> You know, I think, what we're doing together, what Meerah and I and the IT and the HR organizations are really doing together is truly understanding what it means to enable productivity for employees. And when you think about having the right tools to enable employees to be productive, doing that in alignment with the culture of the organization. What is it that drives our sense of meaning and accomplishment? And then being able to do it in a way, both in a physical environment, whether that physical environment is in the office or if it is remote, we do look collectively together at the change management. How do you get employees to adopt new ways of doing things? And utilize that and learn from it. So if we experiment with certain types of productivity tools as Meerah was talking about. Which ones work, which ones needed a change, what works for some teams and didn't work for others? When she and I can do that together and our departments can do that together, that enables us to truly drive productivity across the organization. >> I would probably add one more thing to what Donna said. I mean the thing is, also if you think about it, you know the human resources, the talent organization has a much better understanding of the culture, of the sub-cultures, right. I mean I've never been in a company even when it's a thousand people company, you have sub-cultures. And HR you know involved in the culture of those sub-cultures. As we are going through from IT point of view, we look at it from user persona, okay. So a salesperson who's actually always on the road or always like more remote worker versus an engineering person. I mean we are a software company, an R & D persona quite a different set of productivity tools compared to a sales person, compared to an executive, compared to an executive assistant right. So for us, it's actually bringing that different functional line of business and the type of persona. And HR is absolutely crucial because as we are looking at it they're saying, what is a success for this organization? And what the culture of the organization and what are the primary job roles? And we don't do it just with HR, but HR uses so much content to get jump start and then we engage with the real users. We are not going with a blank sheet of paper. We are going with something that they can react to and they add to it. So we're doing a design thinking with them that something they can be in start to get rather than you know white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, you know ask what you want, you'll be getting pie in the sky and the moon. >> Well it's a good thing you have those virtual sticky's too. That'll help with that design thinking right? You know, one of the things that I've been saying is that you know, we've never seen obviously anything like this before, a forced shut down of the economy which is why we're going to remember it. And like 911, you know post 911, we are going to see some things here that have permanence. And post GDPR for example, it required certain changes. So Donna, I wonder if we could start with you, just and it's ironic that we're starting a new decade with this crisis. We're not just going to go back and revert to 2019. There's not just going to be some you know all of a sudden everything is rosy again, it's not. It's going to, there's going to be certain permanent changes. How much have you thought about that and do you have any visibility on what those are going to be? >> Yeah, you know when I step back and I think about this and I think a large part of it has to do with much of what Meerah was just talking about in terms of design thinking. It's really, I think for all of us, it's coming back to recognize that this became almost a forced opportunity to focus on business continuity. And how do we think about what's right for us as we move forward? But the design of that is based on what is right, what's the context for that particular business? What's the culture of that organization? What are the products and services that that business provides? What are the sub-cultures in the organization? So for me, it really does step back to say, look we need to focus on business continuity. And now we have a couple of new models, where in the past it would be really easy for managers to say, you know I don't think my team can work remotely, or your job isn't possible to do remotely. And now what we're finding in many businesses is that many jobs can actually be done remotely, if they're provided the right tools and the right resources. So for me, I step back and say, as we think about the business continuity going forward, there is a new way to work. It is a combination of finding that flexibility between working in the office and remote work. And providing the right tools that enable employees to be able to do it successfully. >> You know, Meerah this notion that Donna's bringing up of business continuance, I've sort of been noodling on this and thinking that going forward, one of the things that will change is that companies might be willing to sub-optimize near term performance to put in better business resiliency. Now at the same time, I know how CEO's think. And they say okay great, we're going to make that investment yeah, fine we'll maybe sacrifice some short term performance. But and I had a really interesting conversation recently with a chief data officer who said, you don't have to sacrifice necessarily with data in this new era. There actually are ways in which you can both drive business resilience and drive productivity and ultimately profitability. What's your thinking on that sort of imbalance or balance, if you will? >> I agree with that statement because to me, you know today's business we need to look at I mean especially with the cloud and some of the new technology that we have, I mean even, I seriously think coming out of COVID there's going to be industries that are going to come out new business models that are going to emerge, right. I mean think about Telemedicine. We have been very, very hesitant about Telemedicine for decades now. I mean that's not a new concept. But we have been very hesitant. We said, "I have to see the doctor." But today pretty much everybody, except for if your seriously injured you're getting Telemedicine. That industry is going to work right. So to me the statement you made is absolutely, absolutely for me it's actually an opportunity coming out of an adversity that's going to come out. When I think about it the most important thing I see is the businesses that are going to be successful, that's why even HR, you know partnership is even more greater. The businesses that have talent with digital dexterity are the ones that are going to win, right. I mean regardless you know, where you are in HR, whether you're in finance, whether you're in IT, you're in R & D, you're in manufacturing, doesn't matter. Your digital dexterity of your company really makes you, whether you win in the market or you're one of those dinosaurs in the market right. And how do you bring those together? That's a cultural change, that's actually educating right. I mean we don't want to leave, we already have talent shortage and we don't want to leave a generation of population behind and focused on only the millennials and others. Because I mean, recently I've been going through Scaled Agile Framework, which is a Lean-Agile. And I really love the board of Lean-Agile. Lean has a lot of economy's of scale. Agile brings a lot of volatility. When you bring them together you get both and that's exactly what we need to do with our talent. Bring the system and bring the digital dexterity that we need to bring to that. Can we get it from a productivity, of course we want to be respectful of privacy, but as we have been going through we have been looking at different productivity metrics, looking at you know, what is the usage pattern for employees? How much quotient they have done, how was my MTTR? I mean in my organization I've been looking at the velocity of all transaction processing, Azure, Allusion escalate time. And we also even you know kind of little, because I think at the end of the day we as humans, we actually are social animals. We need the touch and we can not forget, we are not mechanical, we are human. So we need that empathy and we need that emotional side of it. So we have been both qualitatively and quantitatively checking with our workforce, how they are feeling about it and also looking at the data to see if the productivity is telling the story what people are talking about. And quite surprised, 66% of our population when we did this culture survey, said they feel more productive in this situation, because many of them contribute it back to, the time they save from not commuting or they feel just the sense of spending a little bit more time with the family, is actually getting them an extra boost. And they can really do a work-life integration, not like a work-life balance they need to do and we also heard about 11% felt pretty much, they are in the same range. But I also want to recognize it's not for everyone, but I mean we do have folks who are in manufacturing, they need to touch the physical things. And those jobs in certain ways need to be, you know more physical. So there's about three to five percent depending on your job functions that, you know what I need access to the lab, because I really feel the changing my connectivity, changing my or just like for the customer I'm repairing their board. I really need to see that. Those are the ones where we find you know absolute physical touch is required. >> You know in a way I mean we're kind of lucky in the technology business, talk about the digital transformation and I've been saying this has been accelerate a lot of digital transformations. But for us, you look at theCUBE, we've been a remote studios, no problem. You're a software company. You've already really transitioned largely to a subscription model, so you can code remotely. But there are some industries and in particular industries where you guys sell a lot of product. I think about healthcare, you mentioned Telemedicine Meerah. Financial services, the Feds, big users of VDI, highly regulated and secure industries. While it's not you know your main thrust, you talk to your peers in those industries. So and I've always said you know some of these industries really haven't digitally transformed. They're actually kind of complacent. My feeling is that this is going to really accelerate you know some of those industries that haven't transformed and haven't been disrupted. I wonder if you could both, you know comment from both a technology perspective and a people perspective. >> You know I think from the people perspective it's really about mindset. And recognizing that how we approach these new problems and these new ways of thinking about getting work done is all about what our minds block us from thinking. And this pushed us into a situation where we've been able to demonstrate roles that we did not think could ever be done remotely, can actually be done remotely. And so for me it is about a mindset shift. It's about enabling the dialogue, sort of having the courage to have that dialogue inside of the organization to understand again what's the business context? What can we do in a more flexible way? And how do we continue to serve our customers the best that we can? >> I think for me it comes down to you know, protection is always in extinction, right, I mean if you're trying to protect a current model and you're trying to be, saying you know, you don't want to be the dinosaur. Things are going to change and being proactive about the change and embracing the change will let you, to some extent influence and control that change versus being the change being done to you. In this particular case, to me looking at it to see especially with today's technology around you know, manufacturing industry's probably going to see a lot of remote trends that while with IOT and robotics coming in. And I see there's going to be one area you may see a drift down on type of talent that's getting extinct. On the other side, we are going to continue to see the demand on technology is going to continue to go up. And especially which is already shortage I mean if I remember the last survey from KPMG in December, the CIO survey said 60% of the CIO's responded they are having challenges with you know filling the roles. And I also remember the other one is around country survey of technology talent shortage. By 2030 the expectation is we are going to leave something around 8.7 billion or seven trillion dollars of revenue on the table and 85% will be unfulfilled. I mean this is the time for you know, really how do you insure, there are industries that are going to transform which means there are certain skills people need re-skill. I mean, even in technology, the re-skill and the up-skill is good to be a constant thing that's actually it's, nobody is bit you know as far from that one in my opinion in today's world. So that re-skill and up-skill is going to, the one's who are going to embrace that, they're going to be in a bigger way, taking advantage of this transitions and transformation. I also think there are areas that we may see what we call the height may have a broader adoption. So you had mentioned about the chief data office, talking about how data can come in. I mean I see automation accelerating. And data is going to be a full component of acceleration and you will see more and more, you know things around how measurement becomes important as a start, that leads to you know more data modeling, that least to more automation. That cycle is going to accelerate. The influence of AI is going to actually even further than we have said. I just wish some of the areas with you know, we have been slow in adoption, a few have accelerated. Some of the challenges we are dealing with now with capacity, we wouldn't have been having problem. I mean when I did a reflection with my team, the one of the highest one ranked by my leadership was we should have accelerated automation more. >> Well I think was some really, really interesting and deep points. Really no industry is safe from disruption and really Meerah to your points, if you're just a paving the cow path, you're going to be in trouble. If you're trying to protect the past from the future you're going to get disrupted. And I feel like you guys really have a good handle on this and it's our pleasure to be able to host and interview such experts like yourselves. I really appreciate you're sharing your insights and your experience with our audience. I mean we're kind of all in this together. So thank you Donna, Meerah. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Both: Thank you so much for having us. >> You're welcome and thank your for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE for my CXO series. We will see you next time. (calm music)

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, coming to you live from day one of our coverage of Citrix Synergy in Atlanta, Georgia. We're very pleased to welcome Citrix's Chief People Officer, Donna Kimmel, EVP-- >> Yeah. >> And Chief People Officer. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me this afternoon. >> My pleasure. It's great to be here, Lisa and Keith. Thank you. >> I was telling you before we went live, Donna, this has been a great event. This is our first day of coverage, but the keynote really kicked things off very, in a way that's so relatable, just showing workforce, and some of the stats you guys gave were staggering. The fact that power users are who enterprise software is designed for. But that's 1% of the users. >> Donna: Exactly. >> Or things like $7 trillion is wasted a year, and Keith's brought this up on a number of our interviews, of wasted productivity. There's a huge need for employee experience to become a C-level business imperative. >> Donna: Yeah. >> Talk to us about that from Citrix's point of view. >> Absolutely. Employee experience is incredibly important. When I think about the concept, it is really about people and technology together. And we can't do great things in the workplace if we don't have the right tools at our fingertips, and technology really supports that. But employee experience is also very broad. It's all encompassing. When we think about employee experience, it's everything from when somebody starts or applies to a company, what kind of experience are they having with that company? What is their interview process like? What is their pre-hire process like? What happens when they come for their onboarding? Are they experiencing the company the way that they should, and then it's about their career journey. So employee experience is incredibly important, and it's incredibly pervasive. But I think it also starts with understanding why it matters to companies. And I think when you look at why it matters to companies, companies can't be successful without people. It's people that are the one's that are driving results. It's people that are the ones that are collaborating and bringing the culture of that company to life, and it's people that are driving new product design and thinking about what customers need and putting customers first. And companies are successful because of the people within it, so we need to create experiences that make a difference. >> So as we talk about those experiences, when I think of Citrix, I think of Citrix in a traditional sense. You front end a work day. You front end HRM from SAP, those solutions. So as Citrix starts to engage more with HR directly, talk me about that value conversation Citrix is having with HR and how Citrix adds value versus a company that's specific focus is in creating HR software. >> Exactly. So we're creating software that enables employees and people in an organization, talent in an organization, to be successful to do their best work on a daily basis. So though we are not creating HR software per se, what we are creating is employee experience, and it's employee experience through the technology. So when employees have the right tools at their fingertips in a way that cuts out the continual searching, as one of the things that we talked about this morning in the keynote, was all about how much time is wasted. At least 25% of an employee's time is wasted searching or context switching between applications, not being able to use the applications to their fullest. And we recognize there's a fair amount that employees need to do that are very task-oriented. And if you can automate those and bring them to the employee in a very intelligent way, using the analytics. You also heard about that this morning as well. The analytics get to know the employee. So it's more personal. So you get what you need to at your fingertips, you can do it more quickly, more easily, and then really focus on some of the more critical things that are going to help you be successful as an employee. >> You bring up the personal aspect, and I think personalization is becoming more and more a critical element of... because as consumers we expect that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So we're starting to see the influences of the consumerization of IT, and it really is something that can be a big differentiator to attract talent and retain talent-- >> Yeah. >> Which is also a business imperative. I'm glad, though, that you brought up, hey, employee experience isn't just, okay, this intelligent experience, and I can have access to all my apps. It starts with the hiring process. >> Absolutely. >> The interviewing, the recruiting. We were talking about our different onboarding experiences, Keith and I were at lunch and how that really can set the tone-- >> Donna: Exactly. >> Of an employee with their employer, and you're right. It's not just about the technology needs to be an enabler, but it's got to start from even the recruitment. >> Exactly. >> When I step back, and I think about employee experience, it brings me back to the concepts that we've been talking about for a while now regarding the future of work. It's really about a company having the right culture, creating the right physical space and digital space, and then also, the technology that's used. And again, culture can be a real differentiator for an organization, just like we know that the talent is a differentiator for companies. But when you think about the culture, it really speaks to what's important to human beings, what's important to employees? Are they socially involved? Is their product meaningful? Is what their doing meaningful to the community, to the customers that they're serving? So are we tapping into what's meaningful to people? Are employees being given opportunities for flexibility and collaboration? Are they being given opportunities for choice? And that also brings me back to what you were talking about in terms of personalization. If we think about the workforce, right now, at least at Citrix, we have about five different generations in our workforce. And you might be able to look across all those different generations and look for trends and different ways that generations might work, but the reality is it's about the individual. It's truly about understanding that individual's choice for working anywhere, anyhow, anyway, on any device. That's what's really going to drive a difference. That becomes part of the culture. If you have the right, again, grounded values, you have the right environment that you're creating, that is part of the appeal to employees. And then you try to create the right space, and you want to create the right physical space because when employees are in the workforce, and when they come into the office, you want it to feel like a place where they can collaborate, where they can change and move, and move into private space if they need it, or quiet space if they need it, or opportunities for, as we say, collisions at the coffee machine where all of a sudden new ideas come out because you're generating thoughts and conversation. So space, physical space, and all of that movement also mimics our personal worlds, right? We get up and we move around to different kind of spaces throughout the day. We want our workspace to feel the same way. And then the other piece to that is technology. And are we creating the right technological tools that enable employees to have that freedom and that choice around the kinds of devices they're using and the spaces where they're working in to really be able to bring their best selves to the workplace and contribute because ultimately, we want to be part of successful organizations. So it's a combination of all of those for me in terms of the question that you were just asking. >> So you're a EVP of a nice size software company. And some of these things you've had to put into practice. Citrix is a 30-year-old company. I think I'm aging myself because I've done a few Citrix deployments early in my own career. >> Yeah. >> As you start to pivot, you're part of these executive-level conversations saying, "We're going to invest in AI, machine learning," and you look at this job market for AI, ML data scientists, it's a tight market. It's really hard to attract the talent. While Florida is lovely, it may not be the place for ML or AI talent, but more specifically, this type of talent might be spread across the world. >> Donna: That's right. >> What types of changes have you had to oversee inside of Citrix to attract and retain that talent? >> Absolutely. I think it's a great point because I think not only are we at Citrix doing it, but many other companies are looking at the same kind of question, which is where do we find the best talent, and how do we enable that talent anywhere around the world to successfully contribute to our company? And because it is so challenging to find talent, we do need to be more flexible as organizations. We need to look at distributed office locations. We need to look at opportunities for people to be able to work from their homes. We look at a total labor force, like gig workers, in addition to contractors and employee base. So our technology enables that. And I think that's one of the great selling points of having people join Citrix is you are part of the movement of helping organizations be flexible. You're part of helping to drive that kind of employee experience so you can hire anyone from anywhere around the world in order to help you achieve the business results that you're looking for. >> In the four years that you've been EVP and Chief People Officer, how have you helped this culture to evolve? As Keith mentioned, this is a 30-year-young company, and cultural change is challenging, again, but we think about it in our personal lives, change is hard. >> Donna: Yeah. >> What are some of the key strategies that you've employed to help facilitate that cultural change? >> It's a great question. When I joined about three and a half years ago, we were embarking on a transformation at the company and part of that transformation was taking a look at where we needed to evolve from a product strategy perspective and from meeting our customer needs in a very different way. And the more we got out there and listened to our customers, it helped solidify what we needed to do from a strategy perspective. What we also realized is you'll never be able to accomplish your strategy without the right people. And you need the right culture and the right set of values that are going to underpin everything you do as a company. So we took some very strong values that were already part of Citrix and kind of modernized them, brought them into words that had meaning for our employees. So we did quite a few feedback sessions, surveys, and things, and gathered. And we really focus, from a strong values perspective, on integrity, respect, curiosity, courage, and unity. And those words have incredible meaning for us in terms of what we're doing to not only transform the products and the markets that we're in, but how do we transform our own workplace to continue to drive an employee experience that lives out those values and that culture? So it underpins everything that we do. >> So let's talk about lessons that can be applied from Citrix, a big company, to smaller companies, because Citrix has customers across the spectrum from the small shop with less than 10 people, to companies with tens of thousands of people. Is employee experience something that only large companies should consider, or is this something that as entrepreneurs like myself only have a couple of employees, should I be thinking about employee experience in a specific way? >> Yeah, that's a great question. When I think about, again, why employee experience is so important, I think, first, it's because it's about people and it's about humanity, and why it matters to any business regardless of your size, is that it's about people first, and people first are going to help any business be able to achieve its goals and its results. The technology that we're creating also is what we call general purpose. It is for individuals to enable individuals to be successful in their workplace. So I do believe strongly it is for any size organization. And the principles ring true, whether you're a small business or whether you're a large business. I know my sister also has a small business, and the team members that work with her, very small business, the team members that work with her need to feel that same vibrancy of what she's trying to create for her clients. And so I think it's the same for any size business. Culture, values, grounding, experience that you can create to enable those employees to feel like they're part of what you're doing and they're part of your success. >> We talked with Simon Bray earlier, and I learned a new acronym, TOMO. >> Yeah. >> I love that. >> Yeah, it's great. >> Total Motivation. >> Exactly. >> How do you measure cultural transformation within Citrix? What are some of those key, is there an internal NPS survey, or other things that you guys do to go, we're going in the right direction here? >> We do, absolutely. It's no doubt challenging to measure. We do an employee net promoter score, and we do an engagement score. So the net promoter score that we do on a quarterly basis, and our full engagement survey, we do on an annual basis. And since we started our transformation, three and a half years ago, our net promoter score has gone up dramatically. And we are nearing the 50% mark, which is very high for employee net promoter scores. So we feel really proud about the constant movement in the right direction around that score, and the same thing with our engagement scores. And we've become certified two years in a row through Great Places To Work. So again, that movement in the right direction is telling us that our employees do feel connected to who we are, what we're doing, and that they feel part of driving those solutions and those results. >> So I was looking at some of the Citrix revenue numbers over the weekend. Looks like a lot of things are up. Subscription revenues, SAS revenue, workspace revenue, and employee satisfaction is up as well. >> Absolutely, and we're proud of all of it. We talk in a very positive way. David, our CEO, always talks about up and to the right. And we are, all of our measures have been up and to the right on a consistent basis, from an employee perspective and from a business results perspective. And it takes every single employee to be able to do that. >> What are you most excited about as we wrap up here. I know we're so early in Synergy 2019, but like I was saying, we've had such an exciting start to our time here. What are you excited about when this is all done in terms of feedback that you're hoping and expecting to hear from the employees? >> I think probably one of the most exciting things for me is to be in the field that I'm in, Human Resources, focusing on people, and focusing on talent, and recognizing that the product that we are putting out there is making a difference from an employee experience perspective. So being part of that vision, that mission I think is incredibly exciting. So we can live it internally as well as help our customers live it within their own environment. And that connection, I think, is incredibly powerful and really meaningful to be a part of. >> It can be such a differentiator as well if your customers see, ah, there's a Citrix on Citrix story. >> Donna: Absolutely. >> And you're transforming using your own technology, that's one of the best brand validations that you can get, right? >> Absolutely, it helps us tell the story with our customers, and it's a great selling point for new employees that are attracted to coming to work for us, become part of the movement and the change of really driving employee experience and driving that partnership through technology. >> Donna, it's been so great to have you on theCUBE with Keith and me-- >> Thank you. >> Helping to expand, at least my perspective of employee experience. >> Lisa: Thank you so much. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. >> Lisa: Oh, likewise. For Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from our day one coverage, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. You're watching theCUBE. We're at UiPath Forward Americas. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. TheCUBE is the leader of, what are we the leader of? (laughs) >> Live tech coverage, Dave. >> The leader in live tech coverage. I've been blowing that line every week. Thanks for watching, everybody. We've got a great segment here. Jean Younger is here. She's the vice president, Six Sigma Leader, Security Benefit. She's to my near left, and Donna O'Donnell is here, director of key accounts at UiPath all the way from New York. Donna, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to see you guys. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> All right, so we're well into day one. We're getting the Kool-Aid injection from customers and UiPath constituents, but Jean, let's start with you. Talk about your role, what's the company do, fill us in. >> Our company is an annuity company. We sell financial products for life insurance and annuities. We have about 30 billion under management, so it's a fairly large company out of Kansas. So, my role there is as a Six Sigma leader. We go in and we look at areas that need improvement or across the company, and one of the things I found, I'd been with the company almost five years now, and what I found is a lot of times, we're really good about putting manual processes in and never getting rid of 'em. We have day two issues of a tech. A tech goes live and you got a list of day two stuff that didn't get fixed, never gets fixed. It's just easier to do it, and cheaper, to leave it manual. So we have a lot of that in the company. With my job, seeing the various processes throughout the company, I was like what can we do to get rid of some of this stuff, get rid of that, get knowledge work back on the worker's plate instead of manipulating a spreadsheet or creating a report that they do every morning and it takes 'em the first 30 minutes or the first seven hours of their day is creating this one report every single day. We started looking at technology and came across UiPath. >> See, we call it GRS, getting rid of stuff. >> Jean: Yep. >> So, Donna, your job is to make these guys successful, right? >> Absolutely, so basically I just facilitate the smart people within the company. I listen to the business needs that Jean and other large clients have. We bring the resources, the products, and if we can't find it, we will absolutely find it and do everything we can to meet the needs. >> So, what's your automation story? When'd you get started? Paint a picture for us, the size, the scope. >> Okay, so last year about this time is when I started looking into it. I had just rolled out of another area that we had completely destroyed and built back up, and I was on to my next escapade in security benefit. >> Dave: Are you a silo buster, is that the new-- >> Yeah, I kind of go in and fix things. I'm kind of a fixer is basically what my job is. We'd rolled out and came back into Six Sigma to start looking and this came up. I'd seen the technology and I was like I wonder if it could work in our company. And so, we started doing kind of dog and pony show. We'd pull the different silos in, talk to 'em and say hey, here's what RPA can do for you. Is that something that you have some processes that might work? And we knew that there were processes in there, but we brainstormed with 'em for about 30 minutes. And out of that 30 minute, hour long conversation, we came out of there with about a hundred processes that people had already identified. And we kept going through there, I took that information, I built a business case, 'cause I knew to get the money, I needed to show them that there would be cost out potentially, and/or that I could take resources and move 'em into more critical areas that we didn't have the staffing. And so I had instances where, one of them that we're doing is out of our HR department. During the raise and salary time, they had two individuals that spent 60 hours a week for four months doing the same thing, same report over and over, and that's one of the processes we're actually going to implement here pretty soon. So, I came up with 'em and put the business plan together and asked for the money, and after kind of a long journey, I got the money. >> Long journey. (Jean and Donna laugh) >> It's never short enough is it? Jean, I mean, one of the things, Six Sigma is really good at measuring things. I mean, that's how you understand everything. You want to reduce variation. There was a line that really jumped out at me at the keynote is I want to go from pretty accurate to perfectly accurate, and when you were describing that there were a lot of things that were manually done. I mean, I lived in engineering for a lot of years and it was anything that somebody had to manually do, it was like oh wait, how can we change that? Because we didn't have RPA 10 years ago when I was looking at this, but how are you measuring these results? You talked about people doing repetitive tasks and the like. What other things are you finding to help get you along those reducing the variation inside the company? >> You know, it's interesting because I also teach the Six Sigma courses there, and one of my slides I've had for years teaching that class is most business processes are between 3.2 and 3.6, 3.8 sigma, which is like 95 to 98% accurate, and I said that's all the better we can usually do because of the expense that it would normally be to get us to a Six Sigma. You look at the places that have Six Sigma. It's life threatening, airplane engines. You hope they're at least Seven Sigma, those type of things, but business processes? 3.5, 3.2. But now, I get to change that because with RPA, I can make them Six Sigma very cheap, very cheaply, because I can pull 'em in, I got my bot, it comes over, pulls the information, and there's no double-keying. There's no miskeys. It's accuracy, 100% accuracy. >> So, what's the ripple effect in terms of the business impact? >> Cost savings, efficiency, customer experience. I mean, think about it. You're a customer, you get your policy, your name's wrong. How happy are you? You're not real happy. You send it back. So, no more of that. I mean, that's huge. So anything touching the customer going out of our business should be exactly how they put it on the application, especially if it was typed. Now, if it was handwritten, all hands are down on that, but if it was typed, it should be accurate. >> Donna, that's really powerful. I worked in a large corporation, we had a Six Sigma initiative and we know how much time and effort and people we were going to put in to have this little movements. >> Incremental change. >> An incremental change here to say. >> Donna: Pretty amazing. >> Blown away to tell you, Six Sigma and it's cheap. Well, what are you seeing? >> And I absolutely see. So, in addition to cost savings, it makes her more agile. But the big thing is, it makes it error free. The robots work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Runs on itself, and Jean's going to get those efficiencies that she needed. >> How about let's talk more about the business case? I'm interested in the hard dollar piece of it. I've talked to a number of people at this show and others, and they tend not to just fire people. They got to redeploy 'em. Sometimes the CFO goes well, where's my hard dollars come from? So, where did your hard dollars come from? (laughs) >> From the CFO. (laughs) And right now, I have to prove that out yet. We're just in its infancy. We're just starting to bring up processes. In fact, yesterday and today we're dealing with several processes coming up, and so realistically, right now I've got about 300 processes. We haven't timed 'em all out yet, but I know right now that's between probably 12 and 15,000 hours of time savings that we will get on an annual basis. >> Okay, what one of the customers said today is, one example they used is they actually put it in next year's budget >> Correct. >> Which I loved. In other words, we're going to do more revenue for the same headcount, or less cost or whatever it is. That's a reasonable justification, maybe even better, right? Because it's got some forward motion to it. Is that kind of discussion and thinking come up? >> Headcount is under discussion right now. We're going through budgeting right now, and so yeah, that was part of the way that we justified the less headcount. Instead of hiring to fill another position, we would remove jobs from a certain person and be able to shift them into another role. And so that savings, non-hiring, as well as one of the processes we're doing is in our investment area. They couldn't afford to get another person. They couldn't get another headcount, so I gave them a headcount with a bot. I'm doing all their processes that they've only been able to do on a monthly basis, we're doing 'em every day. It's 52 processes they're going to do every day. It's an amazing, I gave 'em a head right there, bam. >> But we're also finding that the folks that were doing the mundane and repetitive tasks can focus on more creative work, more interesting work that they believe in and that they're motivated to do. We see that happening all the time. >> What does that mean for culture inside your company? Was there resistance at first? I have to think it's got to improve morale that it's like oh wait, I'm not getting in trouble for making mistakes now and I can go focus on things that fit better. >> You know, I think ultimately it will. Initially, there was a feeling gosh, the bots are going to take my job. But that was one thing we were pretty careful about initially going out and just saying what is it that you can't do? We all work 50, 60, some of them people are working 70 hours a week, and if I can take 10 or 20 hours away from them, they are lovin' us. There's individuals that are saying come here. I'll show you what I need. They also realize the ability of the bot to do it right all the time takes a little stress off of them, because they know they're going to get the right numbers, then, to analyze, 'cause that's a big thing. In the finance area, in the close, in the accounting area, what we're doing there is we're taking a lot of those simple process that somebody has to do and do them for them so then guess what? We can close earlier, get our books closed earlier in the month, as well as allow them longer time to analyze the results. So instead of the book's closed and then we go uh-oh, found a problem. Got to reopen the ledger and make an entry, we have less and less of that. Those are expectations that are set right now for our teams is that hey, let's get rid of the stuff that we can, and then let's see what's left. >> And Dave, I used to meet with clients and they used to say wow, this is a really interesting technology. Tell me about it. And now they're like holy crap, I'm behind the eight ball with my competition. How do we get this going quick? How do we get it going fast? In 2016, it was a $250 million industry, and by 2021, it's going to be a $3 billion industry we learned today. So it's pretty powerful. >> I think those numbers are low, by the way. >> I think they're low, too. What they said today, it's going to be a $3.4 billion industry. >> I think it's a 10x factor, probably by 2023 to 2025, I think this is going to be a $10 billion business. I've done a lot of forecasting in my life. That's just a gut feel swag, but it sort of feels like that. I think there's some pieces that are, there's some blind spots in terms of use cases and applications that we can't even see yet. Culturally, the light bulb moment, just listening to you, Jean, was the, first of all you're saying, you want your weekends back? Yeah! And then the second is it sounds like the employees are involved in sort of defining those processes, so they own it. >> And that's how we're scaling. I mean, we already realized we're a bottleneck. Our COE is a bottleneck and so we're like hey, right now, finance, it's not the end of the year. It's end of quarter, but those process are lighter than end of the year. So hey, can we get anything done? They're doing our documentation for us. They're actually taping themselves doing it, they're writing up the documentation. We come in and we look at it, and then we have a programmer doing it, but we're talking about how do we move that programming piece down to them as well, so we can get our scale up? Because I can't get through 300 processes in my small COE without a lot of help from the business. >> But Dave, most of our clients, the way that they scale very quickly is through partners. So, partners can do one of many things. They can be the developers, they can be the implementers, they could create the center of excellence, or they could pick which are the low-hanging processes. When we started off with Jean while she was going through the approval process, I brought out four partners, I gave 'em my own little mini RFP. They each had a four-hour time slot. They presented in front of Jean and we narrowed it down to two, and two of the partners are here at this event today. Most clients need to depend on partners. >> Well, that's key Donna, right? And I've said before, when you start seeing the big names that are around here, you know it's an exciting space. They don't just tiptoe and play around and games. They do some serious work for businesses. We got to turn the conversation to diversity, generally, but I also want to ask you specifically about women in tech. So, Stu and I were in a conference at Splunk earlier this week. The CEO of Carnival had a great line about diversity. He said, a big believer in diversity, of course. He's African American, and he said 40 years ago when I cracked in business, there weren't a lot of people I worked with that looked like me. I thought that was striking, Stu. I think there's always been women in tech, but not enough and a lot of stories about things that have happened to women in tech. It's changing slowly. A lot of women enter the field and then leave because they don't see a path to their future in things they like. What do you guys think about the topic, two women here on the panel today, which is our pleasure to have you. You can see, we need help. We have women working for us, (Jean and Donna laugh) but there's an imbalance there. >> You're right. >> What do you tell someone like us who's trying to find more women or more diversity and bring them into their-- >> Jean has many opinions in this space. Go ahead, Jean, I love your opinions in this space. >> I told the story at one of the UiPath events. I've been, as a lawyer, chemist, I've always been in pretty much a man's world. That's been my life in corporate America, and all along as I looked back, Donna was the first woman that sat across me to negotiate a contract. The entire time that I've been in the tech world, in the business world in corporate America, I had women working for me when I was at an insurance company negotiation very large contracts and stuff. They were on my side of the table. She was the first woman that I negotiated with on the other side of the table, and I think that's really sad, and I think we all have to look and say, how can we do better than that? How can we make us diverse? I look around here and you have all colors, all sizes, it's wonderful and it energizes you. And I am really a true believer in a really diverse workforce. I look at that and I think, 'cause they bring so many cool ideas, they think differently. Young, old, you put 'em all in a room and it's just amazing what they come up with, and I think if business leaders would hear that and think about that instead of hearing the same type of person, what's that same type of person that has your same background going to give you? He's not going to give you the transformation, or he or she. It's going to be kind of the same, what you're used to. You need that jolt, and I believe the more diverse people that we have around the table trying to solve the problem, it's amazing. I sat, last week, and I had a 22-year-old woman come into my office, Shirat, who's 30-ish and from India, and I had Amy who grew up in Topeka, hasn't left Topeka, myself. We were sitting around a table and another guy came and he probably 30. So you had a big, broad range. Somebody just out of college, me that's been out of college a long time, sitting around the table and we came up with, they thought they were dead in the water, and within 30 minutes of us just throwing different ideas out, we came up with a solution that we could continue going with. I mean, their faces were downtrodden and everything when they walked in, and when they left, we were excited, we were ready to go. Now, if we don't nurture that type of conversation, we're never going to get diversity. That's what diversity's about. If you think about it that way, wow. We went from having a problem that was a total dead stop and we weren't going to be able to proceed to 30 minutes later having a great solution and keeping running. And I truly believe it was because we had a diverse group of people around that table. >> Studies have been done of the clear value of diversity, the decisions that are made are better and drive business value. One of the challenges is finding the people, and it was pointed out to me one time, it's just because you're looking inside your own network. You got to go outside your own network, and it takes longer, it's more work. You just got to allocate the time, and it's good advice. It's hard work, but you got to do it to make change. >> And sometimes you got to take a chance. Sometimes, because it is outside of your network, you're not comfortable necessarily with the answers they give you or the way they approach a subject. I mean, you've got to feel comfortable, and CEOs and CFOs and the C-suite has to start thinking about that, because if you wanted to be transforming, that's how you transform. You don't transform thinking the same way every day. You're not going to transform. >> Let me ask you a question. You said you're a fixer, so I wrote down the adjectives that I would use to describe a fixer, and I want to know if this has been the way in which people have described you. You got to be smart, you got to be a quick study, you got to be a good listener, you got to be confident, self-assured, tough, decisive, collaborative. Are those the adjectives that have described you as a fixer over the years? >> Yes, I think those are you qualities, by the way. >> I don't doubt they're your qualities. Is that how people refer to you in business? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, I've done the test where they say are you a collaborator or do you push? And I get the mix. I'm either a collaborator or I'm a person that's pushing her own belief, and I know exactly who said I was a person that was only pushing her own belief, and I know the ones that said I was a collaborator. But that is, you got to be collaborative. >> I believe you have those attributes, but the reason for my question is a lot of times when it's a woman fixer, those aren't the adjectives that they would use to describe you. It would be abrasive or combative. I mean, you hear adjectives like that. Same exactly attributes as a male fixer, just described differently. Has that changed in your view? >> I go about things probably a little bit differently than men do, and I've had to adapt. Like I said, I've been a chemist. What was I? 8% of the community of chemists is a woman, so I've had to adapt my style. And I do a lot of drive-bys, I do a lot of one-on-one discussions over the lunch, over hey, do you have a few minutes? I need to talk to you. So, I do a lot of that type of collaboration before I ever get into that big meeting where I'm pushing my one direction. I've got my buddies all lined up already, and so I don't think it feels like I'm abrasive or that I'm, because I've fought those battles privately already. So maybe I've adapted my style that I don't get those types of reactions, but that's what you got to do. You've got to learn how to work the system. >> At the same time, I think that, and this is a compliment, I think Jean on the outside, it's tough to earn her respect in the beginning, but if you do, there's nobody more fiercely loyal than Jean. So you got to earn your way in there, and that's got to be consistent, like a 15-step process to get there. (Jean laughs) >> Yeah. >> And you can't let go because if you let go-- >> Dave: They're hard to get, huh? >> She's going to make you think on number six day you're not good enough, and then you just got to keep on going. So I understand what you're stating, Dave. You have to keep on going, and if you get there there's nothing that Jean wouldn't do for you. As she's here, she's on the advisory board of UiPath. She is the most, once you prove yourself, that's it. It's going to be hard to change that, but it's not easy to get there. >> So this inherent bias, people are tribal in nature and they're biased. Does things like automation and RPA, AI, does it eliminate that bias or does it codify it? >> Wow, interesting question. I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. >> Dave: I don't think anybody knows. >> I don't know that either. >> I've never really thought about it. I mean, to me RPA is just another tool in my toolkit, you know? And if I can fix it with AI, great, or UiPath, if I can use that to fix it with RPA, great. If I need another toolkit, I'll go use that toolkit. But I do know that it's a way that individuals, you can get a lot of young people into your organization that have great ideas. I'm stocking up with interns and I'm using, like I said, woman we hired, she was my intern, graduated in May, and the next day she had a full-time job. And she's done a phenomenal job. And that's what RPA has done for our business, because it's an entree in that then they're in and they're doing this simpler technology, then people see how wonderful they are and they can go and move into bigger and better roles. And that's what I'm trying to encourage is get some really smart people in with this tool, and that's what UiPath has enabled, I think, people that maybe they're not the best coders, or maybe they're not the best BAs, but you put that together and they're knocking it out of the park. The young ones are knocking it out of the park on this technology. It's amazing. >> We did several blockchain and Crypto conferences this year, you want to talk about diversity, and I mean it's old money, it's new money, it's women, it's people in turbans, it's people with color. It's actually quite amazing, and one of the older investors, I asked him what's your secret? He said, "I surround myself with millennials." (laughs) >> Jean: Correct. >> That was good advice, but very diverse crowd in Crypto. You don't have to be Ivy League, Silicon Valley and white, Caucasian, to be successful, right? >> Dave, I was representing RPA at a Women in Tech conference last week in the FinTech environment, and I was talking, sitting next to Crypto and Bitcoin and at the end, the lines lined up for RPA. And I would say to the girls, why are you lined up for RPA? And they basically said you are the disruptor. RPA is the disruptor. There was a speaker here today that says RPA's the gateway drug to artificial intelligence, which is absolutely true. RPA is operational right now, it's working today, and there's elements of AI that are here today, but there's elements that are future technology. But RPA's completely ready to go, operational, mainstream in most enterprise companies. >> And I know we kind of went off topic there but it's relevant and it's important and it's a passion of ours, so really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Stu. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward in Miami. Right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube. Covering PentahoWorld 2017. Brought to you by, Hitachi Vantara. >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is PentahoWorld, #pworld17 and this is The Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Jim Kobielus Donna Prlich is here, she's the Chief Product Officer of Pentaho and a many-time Cube guest. Great to see you again. >> Thanks for coming on. >> No problem, happy to be here. >> So, I'm thrilled that you guys decided to re-initiate this event. You took a year off, but we were here in 2015 and learned a lot about Pentaho and especially about your customers and how they're applying this, sort of, end-to-end data pipeline platform that you guys have developed over a decade plus, but it was right after the acquisition by Hitachi. Let's start there, how has that gone? So they brought you in, kind of left you alone for awhile, but what's going on, bring us up to date. >> Yeah, so it's funny because it was 2015, it was PentahoWorld, second one, and we were like, wow, we're part of this new company, which is great, so for the first year we were really just driving against our core. Big-Data Integration, analytics business, and capturing a lot of that early big-data market. Then, probably in the last six months, with the initiation of Hitachi Ventara which really is less about Pentaho being merged into a company, and I think Brian covered it in a keynote, we're going to become a brand new entity, which Hitachi Vantara is now a new company, focused around software. So, obviously, they acquired us for all that big-data orchestration and analytics capability and so now, as part of that bigger organization, we're really at the center of that in terms of moving from edge to outcome, as Brian talked about, and how we focus on data, digital transformation and then achieving the outcome. So that's where we're at right now, which is exciting. So now we're part of this bigger portfolio of products that we have access to in some ways. >> Jim: And I should point out that Dave called you The CPO of Pentaho, but in fact you're the CPO of Hitachi Vantara, is that correct? >> No, so I am not. I am the CPO for the Pentaho product line, so it's a good point, though, because Pentaho brand, the product brand, stays the same. Because obviously we have 1,800 customers and a whole bunch of them are all around here. So I cover that product line for Hitachi Vantara. >> David: And there's a diverse set of products in the portfolios >> Yes. >> So I'm actually not sure if it makes sense to have a Chief Products officer for Hitachi Vantara, right? Maybe for different divisions it makes sense, right? But I've got to ask you, before the acquisition, how much were you guys thinking about IOT and Industrial IOT? It must have been on your mind, at about 2015 it certainly was a discussion point and GE was pushing all this stuff out there with the ads and things like that, but, how much was Pentaho thinking about it and how has that accelerated since the acquisition? >> At that time in my role, I had product marketing I think I had just taken Product Management and what we were seeing was all of these customers that were starting to leverage machine-generated data and were were thinking, well, this is IOT. And I remember going to a couple of our friendly analyst folks and they were like, yeah, that's IOT, so it was interesting, it was right before we were acquired. So, we'd always focus on these blueprints of we've got to find the repeatable patterns, whether it's Customer 360 in big data and we said, well they're is some kind of emerging pattern here of people leveraging sensor data to get a 360 of something. Whether it's a customer or a ship at sea. So, we started looking at that and going, we should start going after this opportunity and, in fact, some of the customers we've had for a long time, like IMS, who spoke today all around the connected cars. They were one of the early ones and then in the last year we've probably seen more than 100% growth in customers, purely from a Pentaho perspective, leveraging Machine-generated data with some other type of data for context to see the outcome. So, we were seeing it then, and then when we were acquired it was kind of like, oh this is cool now we're part of this bigger company that's going after IOT. So, absolutely, we were looking at it and starting to see those early use cases. >> Jim: A decade or more ago, Pentaho, at that time, became very much a pioneer in open-source analytics, you incorporated WECA, the open-source code base for machine-learning, data mining of sorts. Into the core of you're platform, today, here, at the conference you've announced Pentaho 8.0, which from what I can see is an interesting release because it brings stronger integration with the way the open-source analytic stack has evolved, there's some Spark Streaming integration, there's some Kafaka, some Hadoop and so forth. Can you give us a sense of what are the main points of 8.0, the differentiators for that release, and how it relates to where Pentaho has been and where you're going as a product group within Hiatachi Vantara. >> So, starting with where we've been and where we're going, as you said, Anthony DeShazor, Head of Customer Success, said today, 13 years, on Friday, that Pentaho started with a bunch of guys who were like, hey, we can figure out this BI thing and solve all the data problems and deliver the analytics in an open-source environment. So that's absolutely where we came form. Obviously over the years with big data emerging, we focused heavily on the big data integration and delivering the analytics. So, with 8.0, it's a perfect spot for us to be in because we look at IOT and the amount of data that's being generated and then need to address streaming data, data that's moving faster. This is a great way for us to pull in a lot of the capabilities needed to go after those types of opportunities and solve those types of challenges. The first one is really all about how can we connect better to streaming data. And as you mentioned, it's Spark Streaming, it's connecting to Kafka streams, it's connecting to the Knox gateway, all things that are about streaming data and then in the scale-up, scale-out kind of, how do we better maximize the processing resources, we announced in 7.1, I think we talked to you guys about it, the Adaptive Execution Layers, the idea that you could choose execution engine you want based on the processing you need. So you can choose the PDI engine, you can choose Spark. Hopefully over time we're going to see other engines emerge. So we made that easier, we added Horton Work Support to that and then this concept of, so that's to scale up, but then when you think about the scale-out, sometimes you want to be able to distribute the processing across your nodes and maybe you run out of capacity in a Pentaho server, you can add nodes now and then you can kind-of get rid of that capacity. So this concept of worker-nodes, and to your point earlier about the Hitachi Portfolio, we use some of the services in the foundry layer that Hitachi's been building as a platform. >> David: As a low balancer, right? >> As part of that, yes. So we could leverage what they had done which if you think about Hitachi, they're really good at storage, and a lot of things Pentaho doesn't have experience in, and infrastructure. So we said, well why are we trying to do this, why don't we see what these guys are doing and we leverage that as part of the Pentaho platform. So that's the first time we brought some of their technology into the mix with the Pentaho platform and I think we're going to see more of that and then, lastly, around the visual data prep, so how can we keep building on that experience to make data prep faster and easier. >> So can I ask you a really Columbo question on that sort-of load-balancing capabilities that you just described. >> That's a nice looking trench coat you're wearing. >> (laughter) gimme a little cigar. So, is that the equivalent of a resource negotiator? Do I think of that as sort of your own yarn? >> Donna: I knew you were going to ask me about that (laughter) >> Is that unfair to position it that way? >> It's a little bit different, conceptually, right, it's going to help you to better manage resources, but, if you think about Mesos and some of the capabilities that are out there that folks are using to do that, that's what we're leveraging, so it's really more about sometimes I just need more capacity for the Pentaho server, but I don't need it all the time. Not every customer is going to get to the scale that they need that so it's a really easy way to just keep bringing in as much capacity as you need and have it available. >> David: I see, so really efficient, sort of low-level kind of stuff. >> Yes. >> So, when you talk about distributed load execution, you're pushing more and more of the processing to the edge and, of course, Brian gave a great talk about edge to outcome. You and I were on a panel with Mark Hall and Ella Hilal about the, so called, "power of three" and you did a really good blog post on that the power of the IOT, and big data, and the third is either predictive analytics or machine learning, can you give us a quick sense for our viewers about what you mean by the power of three and how it relates to pushing more workloads to the edge and where Hitachi Vantara is going in terms of your roadmap in that direction for customers. >> Well, its interesting because one of the things we, maybe we have a recording of it, but kind of shrink down that conversation because it was a great conversation but we covered a lot of ground. Essentially that power of three is. We started with big data, so as we could capture more data we could store it, that gave us the ability to train and tune models much easier than we could before because it was always a challenge of, how do I have that much data to get my model more accurate. Then, over time everybody's become a data scientist with the emergence of R and it's kind of becoming a little bit easier for people to take advantage of those kinds of tools, so we saw more of that, and then you think about IOT, IOT is now generating even more data, so, as you said, you're not going to be able to process all of that, bring all that in and store it, it's not really efficient. So that's kind of creating this, we might need the machine learning there, at the edge. We definitely need it in that data store to keep it training and tuning those models, and so what it does is, though, is if you think about IMS, is they've captured all that data, they can use the predictive algorithms to do some of the associations between customer information and the censor data about driving habits, bring that together and so it's sort of this perfect storm of the amount of data that's coming in from IOT, the availability of the machine learning, and the data is really what's driving all of that, and I think that Mark Hall, on our panel, who's a really well-known data-mining expert was like, yeah, it all started because we had enough data to be able to do it. >> So I want to ask you, again, a product and maybe philosophy question. We've talked on the Cube a lot about the cornucopia of tooling that's out there and people who try to roll their own and. The big internet companies and the big banks, they get the resources to do it but they need companies like you. When we talk to your customers, they love the fact that there's an integrated data pipeline and you've made their lives simple. I think in 8.0 I saw spark, you're probably replacing MapReduce and making life simpler so you've curated a lot of these tools, but at the same time, you don't own you're own cloud, you're own database, et cetera. So, what's the philosophy of how you future-proof your platform when you know that there are new projects in Apache and new tooling coming out there. What's the secret sauce behind that? >> Well the first one is the open-source core because that just gave us the ability to have APIs, to extend, to build plugins, all of that in a community that does quite a bit of that, in fact, Kafka started with a customer that built a step, initially, we've now brought that into a product and created it as part of the platform but those are the things that in early market, a customer can do at first. We can see what emerges around that and then go. We will offer it to our customers as a step but we can also say, okay, now we're ready to productize this. So that's the first thing, and then I think the second one is really around when you see something like Spark emerge and we were all so focused on MapReduce and how are we going to make it easier and let's create tools to do that and we did that but then it was like MapReduce is going to go away, well there's still a lot of MapReduce out there, we know that. So we can see then, that MapReduce is going to be here and, I think the numbers are around 50/50, you probably know better than I do where Spark is versus MapReduce. I might be off but. >> Jim: If we had George Gilbert, he'd know. >> (laughs) Maybe ask George, yeah it's about 50/50. So you can't just abandon that, 'cause there's MapReduce out there, so it was, what are we going to do? Well, what we did in the Hadoop Distro days is we created a adaptive, big data layer that said, let's abstract a layer so that when we have to support a new distribution of Hadoop, we don't have to go back to the drawing board. So, it was the same thing with the execution engines. Okay, let's build this adaptive execution layer so that we're prepared to deal with other types of engines. I can build the transformation once, execute it anywhere, so that kind of philosophy of stepping back if you have that open platform, you can do those kinds of things, You can create those layers to remove all of that complexity because if you try to one-off and take on each one of those technologies, whether it's Spark or Flink or whatever's coming, as a product, and a product management organization, and a company, that's really difficult. So the community helps a ton on that, too. >> Donna, when you talk to customers about. You gave a great talk on the roadmap today to give a glimpse of where you guys are headed, your basic philosophy, your architecture, what are they pushing you for? Where are they trying to take you or where are you trying to take them? (laughs) >> (laughs) Hopefully, a little bit of both, right? I think it's being able to take advantage of the kinds of technologies, like you mentioned, that are emerging when they need them, but they also want us to make sure that all of that is really enterprise-ready, you're making it solid. Because we know from history and big data, a lot of those technologies are early, somebody has to get their knees skinned and all that with the first one. So they're really counting on us to really make it solid and quality and take care of all of those intricacies of delivering it in a non-open-source way where you're making it a real commercial product, so I think that's one thing. Then the second piece that we're seeing a lot more of as part of Hitachi we've moved up into the enterprise we also need to think a lot more about monitoring, administration, security, all of the things that go at the base of a pipeline. So, that scenario where they want us to focus. The great thing is, as part of Hitachi Vantara now, those aren't areas that we always had a lot of expertise in but Hitachi does 'cause those are kind of infrastructure-type technologies, so I think the push to do that is really strong and now we'll actually be able to do more of it because we've got that access to the portfolio. >> I don't know if this is a fair question for you, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because you just talked about some of the things Hitachi brings and that you can leverage and it's obvious that a lot of the things that Pentaho brings to Hitachi, the family but one of the things that's not talked about a lot is go-to-market, Hitachi data systems, traditionally don't have a lot of expertise at going to market with developers as the first step, where in your world you start. Has Pentaho been able to bring that cultural aspect to the new entity. >> For us, even though we have the open-source world, that's less of the developer and more of an architect or a CIO or somebody who's looking at that. >> David: Early adopter or. >> More and more it's the Chief Data Officer and that type of a persona. I think that, now that we are a entity, a brand new entity, that's a software-oriented company, we're absolutely going to play a way bigger role in that, because we brought software to market for 13 years. I think we've had early wins, we've had places where we're able to help. In an account, for instance, if you're in the data center, if that's where Hitachi is, if you start to get that partnership and we can start to draw the lines from, okay, who are the people that are now looking at, what's the big data strategy, what's the IOT strategy, where's the CDO. That's where we've had a much better opportunity to get to bigger sales in the enterprise in those global accounts, so I think we'll see more of that. Also there's the whole transformation of Hitachi as well, so I think there'll be a need to have much more of that software experience and also, Hitachi's hired two new executives, one on the sales side from SAP, and one who's now my boss, Brad Surak from GE Digital, so I think there's a lot of good, strong leadership around the software side and, obviously, all of the expertise that the folks at Pentaho have. >> That's interesting, that Chief Data Officer role is emerging as a target for you, we were at an event on Tuesday in Boston, there were about 200 Chief Data Officers there and I think about 25% had a Robotic Process Automation Initiative going on, they didn't ask about IOT just this little piece of IOT and then, Jim, Data Scientists and that whole world is now your world, okay great. Donna Prlich, thanks very much for coming to the Cube. Always a pleasure to see you. >> Donna: Yeah, thank you. >> Okay, Dave Velonte for Jim Kobielus. Keep it right there everybody, this is the Cube. We're live from PentahoWorld 2017 hashtag P-World 17. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back in Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge17. I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost Jeff Frick. Donna Woodruff is here, she's the service enablement leader at Cox Automotive. Donna, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Good to see you, you're welcome. Tell us a little bit about Cox Automotive, and specifically your role. Are you an IT practitioner by trade, or business process person? Share with us. >> A little bit of everything, actually. First of all, Cox Automotive is a large, privately-held organization that's part of the Cox Enterprises family. We are changing the way the world buys, sells, and owns vehicles. We are made up of five key solution group areas. Everything from inventory solutions, which includes our auto auctions, and everything to get cars from dealerships to our auctions and back out again for their inventory. We have financial services, which provides floor planning to our dealerships so they can buy cars from our auctions. We have media services, which are all about how do you connect the cars that you're selling to retail customers, so autotrader.com, Kelley Blue Book are some notable brands as part of our organization. We develop software around analytics, and an ERP system for dealerships, to help them move their inventory and do their floor planning, so they can maximize sales in their dealerships. And then of course we have international. We are a global company. We have over 34,000 team members that we support. We're a very heterogeneous organization, and that can drive complexity into the organization. My role is, I am the service enablement leader. I am based out of technology, but I look at my role as much broader than that. It's about solving problems for our business and being able to deliver services internally and externally, and help the organization run more efficient and effectively. >> So you've seen, you know, the narrative in IT, and ServiceNow's described that very well over the years, IT getting beat up, and you only call IT when there's a problem, and obviously the platform and the adoption of that have changed a lot of organizations, presumably you experience something similar. So, take us back to the beginning days, the early days of what it was like, the before and after ServiceNow. What led you to that decision? What were some of the drivers, how'd you get there? >> Absolutely. Well, Kelley Blue Book was an acquisition for Autotrader group of companies about four or five years ago, and they had implemented ServiceNow as a help desk ticketing system. When we acquired them, we saw some great wins with the platform that we thought, hey, this really should be our help desk ticketing system. And so it brought under cross that small group of companies, but it was always viewed as a help desk ticketing system. Over time, just like many other platforms, it starts to get highly customized. Fast-forward to a couple of years ago, we had a need. I was supporting HR and communications from a technology liaison perspective. The problem that they were trying to solve was that they have two employee service centers, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, that were staffed by analysts, and they primarily helped our auto auction personnel deal with their benefits and questions around just HR. All the way down to time sheet corrections and things like that. They came to me with this problem, and they said, "You know, we've been using Remedy to some extent." We were in a transitional time in the organization where we were collapsing our help desk tools onto ServiceNow, and they said, "We need some help, here." "We just want to do a few requests." Well, we identified early on as that liaison that I really think that this ticketing platform can do what you need it do. Myself along with a business analyst and an intern sat down with the business, we understood the requirements, and that was the launch of our HR portal. While we were in there-- >> Just you, an analyst, and an intern. >> That's correct. That's correct. And we weren't developers. It was all about configuration. But we understood the tool, we understand that this is really no different than any other business process, and we set out to deliver the first service catalog around HR services. Since then, we haven't looked back. We learned a lot about the platform. We diagrammed out what was wrong with how the service desk had been highly customized, we sat down with our VP and we just showed him the diagram and said, "We think that this platform can do a lot more." He listened to us, and he turned to us, and he said, "Well, do you guys want the platform?" And I turned to my team, and I said, "Do you guys want it?" We took it on, and since then, in the last 18 months, we have expanded the platform very broadly. We've implemented performance analytics to improve our help desk services. Beyond the HR portal, we are now implementing governance risk compliance, a vulnerability management. We're now doing PPM as well. We are re-looking at our CMDB because we want to do more with automation. We've done some orchestration with storage agility and how we can get those engineers more productive by doing zero-touch ticket requests from our developers to expand file shares and to sunset file shares, or to request new file shares with other applications. >> So what'd you do with all the custom mods, when you talked about the Kelley Blue Book coming over. Did you sort of scrub the hose and start over, or-- >> Well, you know what, we took it back to out of the box, and it wasn't difficult to do. We just rationalized the things that were duplicated across requests and incident, we pulled it back to out of the box, we took an agile approach. My team now is very agile. We do weekly releases on the platform. By bringing it back to out of the box, it allows us to upgrade to the latest major feature releases within a two-week period. Because of that, we're able to adopt and consume the new product enhancements that ServiceNow has to offer very, very quickly. >> So, obviously you had success, or you wouldn't have been able to expand the footprint so radically. How are you measuring success, how did you go from a little bitty thing to a very large thing? >> I think it's about visibility. Visibility and strong leadership support, and showing how we're getting better incrementally over time. I think one of the strategic things that we've done, probably in the last six months, is implement performance analytics, which that started to show the behaviors of how people were working within the platform, how they were addressing incidents, how they were responding to our mean time to response, to our mean time to closure of a ticket, the aging of these tickets. When we first implemented performance analytics, we found a lot of anomalies in the platform. We found orphaned assignment groups, which to the behavior of the organization, they weren't necessarily working the system the way they should be. >> Jeff: Orphaned assignment groups. >> Orphaned assignment groups. Tickets were going in and they were backing up, and nobody was working them. So, allowed us to change the behavior of the organization, to drive consistency in how they were using this, which then made the metrics more meaningful. Now people are running their areas of operation from the platform. >> So the next thing I got to ask you, we talked about it in the open, is behavior. Tech's hard, but it's not that hard compared to people and process. How did you get people at that moment of truth, when I need something, to not send an email like I'm used to, and to actually execute my work through this tool? >> Well, one thing we did that was very unique, and we've continued to do that is as we roll out major feature functionality, we actually create commercials about ServiceNow, about the platform. Internally, we call it Service Station. Everything is associated with a vehicle. We've promoted our brand around the platform as well, and our brand is about doing things more simply, getting things routed to the right people, that's why it's better than email, and demonstrating the power of what it will do to you, and getting those answers more quickly instead of going to your favorite IT person or your favorite HR person. How this platform is helping you get to your answers more quickly, as well as all the self-service capabilities and the knowledge articles around, hey, fix it yourself. You don't have to talk to somebody on the phone. But we still give that personalized touch if they really need help and they want to talk to an individual. >> So really, a lot more carrots than sticks. >> Lot more carrots than sticks, absolutely. It's if you can solve your problem faster, why not? 'Cause at the end of the day, that's ultimately what you want to do. Solve your problem, and get on to the rest of your day. >> How long does it take for a typical employee to go, "Ah, this is fantastic!", and to really shift their behavior and buy in and start selling it, as your advocate? >> I think we're doing a better job now, introducing it to our new hires as soon as they get engaged in the organization, about this is your platform to go to when and if you need help. And here's how easy it is to find the things that you need. It's something that just happens over time, and I think if you address some of those small wins, you create advocates in the organization, and when they have a good experience, they tell others. So some of it's word-of-mouth, some of it is internal promotion. A big part of it is leveraging the platform to get the work done and having a great user experience along the way. >> Donna, you mentioned Service Catalog and CMDB, these are consistently two components that allow customers like you to get more leverage out of the ServiceNow platform. So, specifically as it relates to CMDB, what are you doing there? Do you have a single CMDB across the organization? Is that something you're considering? >> That's probably one of our next big transformational areas. We do have a CMDB within the platform that's been used primarily around the linkages for incident, problem, and change management. But we know that we need to do more with it, and like I said before, we've grown through acquisition, so there's a number of other CMDBs. And we are in the process of bringing that all together onto the ServiceNow platform. Because we're seeing the power of everything else that that connects to. And that's also going to be a key on how we promote more orchestration, more automation, more about the health of our services. >> So, ServiceNow's obviously promoting you guys throughout this event, showcasing some of the things that you've been doing. What've you been talking to other customers about? What are you most proud of? >> Honestly, I'm really proud of my team (laughs), because we are responding to the needs of the organization, and the fact that you can add value through what you do on a day-to-day basis is great. I think one of the most unique things that, in terms of the application, is we actually built an application for our safety auctions. So, as you can imagine, we have a hundred auctions. There's a lot of people working in the auctions. We have everything that a dealership would have, and we have lanes of vehicles running through to be auctioned off with our dealerships. So we have service areas, we have vehicles and people moving about the auction. So safety is a very critical thing for our organization. About a year ago, the safety director came and said, "You know, we have this problem. "We are doing these auctions' safety checklist "around compliance, how can we make "our auctions a safer place?" "You know, we don't have a lot of money, "but we think there's a better way to do it." And they explained the process where they had six area safety managers that were distributed across these hundred auctions, and trying to get the safety message out there through making sure people were wearing their goggles, or that they had all the appropriate OSHA standards in place. So after having a lot of conversations around this, again, we found ServiceNow would be a great solution. We did work with a partner to help us build it, but we took a very manual process and we automated it on the platform. Now we've moved the safety business process to the auctions themselves, where they own it. The general manager's involved, the shop leads are involved in it. And what it's done, it's been a catalyst to reducing our workers' comp claims. We've seen a two basis point improvement over the number of workers' comp claims, which is cost-avoidance, you know. When your average worker comp claim can be around $10,000, that's a significant saving. With a very, very small investment, we saw a 3,000% ROI on this initiative alone. We're bringing visibility to the process, using the platform and the reporting capabilities. It's gotten the general managers and the shop leads engaged and having the conversation about safety. >> This is great, 'cause you got the platform piece of it, and went from basic application delivery to seeing that it is just a workflow tool. >> Donna: Exactly. >> And the benefit of the automation, and now applying it to, I don't think they announced a auto auction safety module this morning. >> No. (laughing) >> Not yet, but we are doing a session... (Donna laughs) >> It's pretty impactful that you were able to see that, execute it with a really small investment, like you said, your initial one with you, an analyst and an intern, and now, really grow and expand the footprint within the organization. >> Yeah, it's really just about business processes in general. You've got everything you need to collect some attributes, or some information, you need to route it or get approvals around it, and then you can measure it. And you can see what's going on with that business process, and then you focus on, how do we improve the business process? The tool helps enable that and facilitate that. >> And how has the conversation around IT value changed, since you started this journey, right? >> Yeah. >> It used to be very cost-focused, I'm sure. Has it evolved to more of a, you mentioned ROI? >> It is, look at it, it's still cost-focused. It's still about savings, but it's also about how do we get things done in an organization more efficiently, with less people pushing paper, and actually focused on solving problems. And being able to measure how we get better in the activities that we're supporting. And then the dollars will follow. >> Dave: Is there a recognition in the business units, that things are changing? >> You know, there really is. One of the areas that we're starting to see real recognition is we're now dipping our toe into customer service management. We brought two platforms together with one of our business units that we acquired in the last year. They were doing some things on Zendesk, they were doing some things on another tool, and they were the same team. So, we've taken that experience, we've brought those agents onto the platform. We didn't change the experience for the customer just yet, because we wanted our agents to be very successful and help them work differently than through email. We pull those channels onto the platform, and now they have a dashboard of these issues in supporting our lenders, who are our customers. Next is really around the portal, in changing the experience for those end customers. Moving it out of the reply to all with email and making it more measurable. We've gotten halfway there, and we see a big growth area there for us, and making a better experience around our customers' support. >> And are you sunsetting some of these other systems as you bring stuff in? >> We absolutely are. I mean, our goal is to eliminate all other ticketing-type systems. In fact, all of the people that are on those ticketing systems, like, "When can we get on the platform?" "We want to be there now." "Help us get there." But bringing things together is going to help us across all of our functional areas, in supporting our customers and our team members much more effectively. It really is becoming our system of action, where you go to get things done. >> Donna, what, from your perspective, is on ServiceNow's to-do list? >> ServiceNow's to-do list. You know, and I've been pretty vocal with ServiceNow, it's like, make it easier for us to use and consume the other capabilities of the platform much more quickly. Allow us to use the great capabilities with some of our external collaborators a little bit more effectively. And I think that's where it is. I think ServiceNow does a fantastic job of bringing more capabilities and maturing all of their service areas. I like the fact that they have two major feature releases a year, and we consume them as quickly as they can send them out, probably faster than some other customers do. And continue to listen to your customers. Just, listen to what our problems are, and our needs are, and continue to answer them. They're doing a good job of that. >> Well, Donna, I have to say thanks for all the great products you guys build. The Kelley Blue Book, we've used it for years-- >> Oh, wonderful! >> And Autotrader, it's a great way to shop for vehicles. So thanks for that! >> You're welcome! >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for sharing your story. >> Keep it right there, everybody. Jeff and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. We'll be right back. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Big Data Silicon Valley 2017. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Here live in Silicon Valley this is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, covering our Big Data SV event, #BigDataSV. Our companion event to Big Data NYC, all in conjunction Strata Hadoop, the Big Data World comes together, and great to have guests come by. Donna Prlich, who's the senior VP of products and solutions at Pentaho, a Hitachi company who we've been following before Hitachi had acquired you guys. But you guys are unique in the sense that you're a company within Hitachi left alone after the acquisition. You're now running all the products. Congratulations, welcome back, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you, good to be back. It's been a little while, but I think you've had some of our other friends on here, as well. >> Yep, and we'll be at Pentaho World, you have Orlando, I think is October. >> Yeah, October, so I'm excited about that, too, so. >> I'm sure the agenda is not yet baked for that because it's early in the year. But what's going on with Hitachi? Give us the update, because you're now, your purview into the product roadmap. The Big Data World, you guys have been very, very successful taking this approach to big data. It's been different and unique to others. >> [Donna} Yep. What's the update? >> Yeah, so, very exciting, actually. So, we've seen, especially at the show that the Big Data World, we all know that it's here. It's monetizable, it's where we, actually, where we shifted five years ago, and it's been a lot of what Pentaho's success has been based on. We're excited because the Hitachi acquisition, as you mentioned, sets us up for the next bit thing, which is IOT. And I've been hearing non-stop about machine learning, but that's the other component of it that's exciting for us. So, yeah, Hitachi, we're-- >> You guys doing a lot of machine learning, a lot of machine learning? >> So we, announced our own kind of own orchestration capabilities that really target how do you, it's less about building models, and how do you enable the data scientists and data preparers to leverage the actual kind of intellectual properties that companies have in those models they've built to transform their business. So we have our own, and then the other exciting piece on the Hitachi side is, on the products, we're now at the point where we're running as Pentaho, but we have access to these amazing labs, which there's about 25 to 50 depending on where you are, whether you're here or in Japan. And those data scientists are working on really interesting things on the R & D side, when you apply those to the kind of use cases we're solving for, that's just like a kid in a candy store with technology, so that's a great-- >> Yeah, you had a built-in customer there. But before I get into Pentaho focusing on what's unique, really happening within you guys with the product, especially with machine learning and AI, as it starts to really get some great momentum. But I want to get your take on what you see happening in the marketplace. Because you've seen the early days and as it's now, hitting a whole another step function as we approach machine learning and AI. Autonomous vehicles, sensors, everything's coming. How are enterprises in these new businesses, whether they're people supporting smart cities or a smart home or automotive, autonomous vehicles. What's the trends you are seeing that are really hitting the pavement here. >> Yeah, I think what we're seeing is, and it's been kind of Pentaho's focus for a long time now, which is it's always about the data. You know, what's the data challenge? Some of the amounts of data which everybody talks about from IOT, and then what's interesting is, it's not about kind of the concepts around AI that have been around forever, but when you start to apply some of those AI concepts to a data pipeline, for instance. We always talk about that 6data pipeline. The reason it's important is because you're really bringing together the data and the analytics. You can't separate those two things, and that's been kind of not only a Pentaho-specific, sort of bent that I've had for years, but a personal one, as well. That, hey, when you start separating it, it makes it really hard to get to any kind of value. So I think what we're doing, and what we're going to be seeing going forward, is applying AI to some of the things that, in a way, will close the gaps between the process and the people, and the data and the analytics that have been around for years. And we see those gaps closing with some of the tools that are emerging around preparing data. But really, when you start to bring some of that machine learning into that picture, and you start applying math to preparing data, that's where it gets really interesting. And I think we'll see some of that automation start to happen. >> So I got to ask you, what is unique about Pentaho? Take a minute to share with the audience some of the unique things that you guys are doing that's different in this sea of people trying to figure out big data. You guys are doing well, an6d you wrote a blog post that I referenced earlier yesterday, around these gaps. How, what's unique about Pentaho and what are you guys doing with examples that you could share? >> Yeah, so I think the big thing about Pentaho that's unique is that it's solving that analytics workflow from the data side. Always from the data. We've always believed that those two things go together. When you build a platform that's really flexible, it's based on open source technology, and you go into a world where a customer says, "I not only want to manage and have a data lake available," for instance, "I want to be able to have that thing extend over the years to support different groups of users. I don't want to deliver it to a tool, I want to deliver it to an application, I want to embed analytics." That's where having a complete end-to-end platform that can orchestrate the data and the analytics across the board is really unique. And what's happened is, it's like, the time has come. Where all we're hearing is, hey, I used to think it was throw some data over and, "here you go, here's the tools." The tools are really easy, so that's great. Now we have all kinds of people that can do analytics, but who's minding the data? With that end-to-end platform, we've always been able to solve for that. And when you move in the open source piece, that just makes it much easier when things like Spark emerge, right. Spark's amazing, right? But we know there's other things on the horizon. Flink, Beam, how are you going to deal with that without being kind of open source, so this is-- >> You guys made a good bet there, and your blog post got my attention because of the title. It wasn't click bait either, it was actually a great article, and I just shared it on Twitter. The Holy Grail of analytics is the value between data and insight. And this is interesting, it's about the data, it's in bold, data, data, data. Data's the hardest part. I get that. But I got to ask you, with cloud computing, you can see the trends of commoditization. You're renting stuff, and you got tools like Kinesis, Redshift on Amazon, and Azure's got tools, so you don't really own that, but the data, you own, right? >> Yeah, that's your intellectual property, right? >> But that's the heart of your piece here, isn't it, the Holy Grail. >> Yes, it is. >> What is that Holy Grail? >> Yeah, that Holy Grail is when you can bring those two things together. The analytics and the data, and you've got some governance, you've got the control. But you're allowing the access that lets the business derive value. For instance, we just had a customer, I think Eric might have mentioned it, but they're a really interesting customer. They're one of the largest community colleges in the country, Ivy Tech, and they won an award, actually, for their data excellence. But what's interesting about them is, they said we're going to create a data democracy. We want data to be available because we know that we see students dropping out, we can't be efficient, people can't get the data that they need, we have old school reporting. So they took Pentaho, and they really transformed the way they think about running their organization and their community colleges. Now they're adding predictive to that. So they've got this data democracy, but now they're looking at things like, "Okay we an see where certain classes are over capacity, but what if we could predict, next year, not only which classes are over capacity, what's the tendency of a particular student to drop out?" "What could we do to intervene?" That's where the kind of cool machine learning starts to apply. Well, Pentaho is what enables that data democracy across the board. I think that's where, when I look at it from a customer perspective, it's really kind of, it's only going to get more interesting. >> And with RFID and smart phones, you could have attendance tracking, too. You know, who's not showing up. >> Yeah absolutely. And you bring Hitachi into the picture, and you think about, for instance, from an IOT perspective, you might be capturing data from devices, and you've got a digital twin, right? And then you bring that data in with data that might be in a data lake, and you can set a threshold, and say, "Okay, not only do we want to be able to know where that student is," or whatever, "we want to trigger something back to that device," and say, "hey, here's a workshop for you to login to right away, so that you don't end up not passing a class." Or whatever it is, it's a simplistic model, but you can imagine where that starts to really become transformative. >> So I asked Eric a question yest6erday. It was from Dave Valante, who's in Boston, stuck in the snowstorm, but he was watching, and I'll ask you and see how it matches. He wrote it differently on Crouch, it was public, but this is in my chat, "HDS is known for main frames, historically, and storage, but Hitachi is an industrial giant. How is Pentaho leveraging the Hitachi monster?" >> Yes, that's a great way to put it. >> Or Godzilla, because it's Japan. >> We were just comparing notes. We were like, "Well, is it an $88 billion company or $90 billion. According to the yen today, it's 88. We usually say 90, but close enough, right? But yeah, it's a huge company. They're in every industry. Make all kinds of things. Pretty much, they've got the OT of the world under their belt. How we're leveraging it is number one, what that brings to the table, in terms of the transformations from a software perspective and data that we can bring to the table and the expertise. The other piece is, we've got a huge opportunity, via the Hitachi channel, which is what's seeing for us the growth that we've had over the last couple of years. It's been really significant since we were acquired. And then the next piece is how do we become part of that bigger Hitachi IOT strategy. And what's been starting to happen there is, as I mentioned before, you can kind of probably put the math together without giving anything away. But you think about capturing, being able to capture device data, being able to bring it into the digital twin, all of that. And then you think about, "Okay, and what if I added Pentaho to the mix?" That's pretty exciting. You bring those things together, and then you add a whole bunch of expertise and machine learning and you're like, okay. You could start to do, you could start to see where the IOT piece of it is where we're really going to-- >> IOT is a forcing function, would you agree? >> Yes, absolutely. >> It's really forcing IT to go, "Whoa, this is coming down fast." And AI and machine learning, and cloud, is just forcing everyone. >> Yeah, exactly. And when we came into the big data market, whatever it was, five years ago, in the early market it's always hard to kind of get in there. But one of the things that we were able to do, when it was sort of, people were still just talking about BI would say, "Have you heard about this stuff called big data, it's going to be hard." You are going to have to take advantage of this. And the same thing is happening with IOT. So the fact that we can be in these environments where customers are starting to see the value of the machine generated data, that's going to be-- >> And it's transformative for the business, like the community college example. >> Totally transformative, yeah. The other one was, I think Eric might have mentioned, the IMS, where all the sudden you're transforming the insurance industry. There's always looking at charts of, "I'm a 17-year-old kid," "Okay, you're rate should be this because you're a 17-year-old boy." And now they're starting to track the driving, and say, "Well, actually, maybe not, maybe you get a discount." >> Time for the self-driving car. >> Transforming, yeah. >> Well, Donna, I appreciate it. Give us a quick tease here, on Pentaho World coming in October. I know it's super early, but you have a roadmap on the product side, so you can see a little bit around the corner. >> Donna: Yeah. >> What is coming down the pike for Pentaho? What are the things that you guys are beavering away at inside the product group? >> Yeah, I think you're going to see some really cool innovations we're doing. I won't, on the Spark side, but with execution engines, in general, we're going to have some really interesting kind of innovative stuff coming. More on the machine learning coming out, and if you think about, if data is, you know what, is the hard part, just think about applying machine learning to the data, and I think you can think of some really cool things, we're going to come up with. >> We're going to need algorithms for the algorithms, machine learning for the machine learning, and, of course, humans to be smarter. Donna, thanks so much for sharing here inside theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Pentaho, check them out. Going to be at Pentaho World in October, as well, in theCUBE, and hopefully we can get some more deep dives on, with their analyst group, for what's going on with the engines of innovation there. More CUBE coverage live from Silicon Valley for Big Data SV, in conjunction with Strata Hadoop, I'm John Furrier. Be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE's Coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022 at the Cosmopolitan in bustling Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, and very pleased to be welcoming back. One of our CUBE alumni, the chairman and CEO of Coupa, the man himself Rob Bernshteyn, Rob great to have you back on the program. >> Great to be with you again. >> It's great to be in person. >> Sure. >> I applaud Coupa for taking the risk and getting all the people here. People are absolutely ready for this. And if there's a company that brings the energy it's Coupa. >> Well, thank you for saying that, we're definitely feeling it. You're right, we took a bit of a risk when we opened up registration that was before COVID, omicron hit. We didn't know what would happen, but we just had such an overwhelming onslaught of registrations and people wanted to be here. And in the last two days of interaction with folks it's just been like a huge reunion after three years of kind of being in home and away. >> Absolutely a huge reunion. One that was, I just felt so normal walking into your keynote yesterday. And of course, I always look for numbers because I know you're going to have numbers. 3.3 trillion, spend under management. You're almost at a trillion, a year run rate, that's huge. The growth of Cuopa, just up into the right. >> It is and it's really in thanks to our customer community. I mean, there are just incredible champions here. Courageous folks that are pushing for change inside their of companies. And we're honored to be the technology platform that drives a lot of that change. A more and more spend driven through the system that spend being optimized going to the right channels. Companies are saving money and it's given them more fuel to pursue their own missions and visions and everything that their companies seek to do. >> I just had a conversation with a customer about an hour ago and he was talking about everything was paper-based, manual, no visibility, and I've talked to other customers and I think I've got Jabil on this afternoon who had like 6 billion in indirect spend. They couldn't see. And with Cuopa, the blinders are off. And there's that visibility, the BSM community is really helping organization glean value, drive profitability. Talk to me about from your perspective how the BSM community has grown to be able to deliver, as you say, value as a service. >> Look what's happening is that the customers we have, we have over 2,500 customers around the world. Every one of these customers, they have their own missions. They have their own visions, they're pursuing their goals, but in order to do that, they need energy. They need gas in their tank, right? And with every dollar we save them, with every method we allow them to become more efficient in the way that they work, the way that they have visibility, the way that they collaborate one another, the way that they think about fulfillment of demand through supply chain design, or sourcing activities, contract negotiations, procurement, sourcing, treasury the way they manage that cash. It's unlocking that firepower. It's given them more gas in the tank and that's incredibly rewarding for me and my colleagues and everyone here because our mission is the amplification of all of their missions on a daily basis, really. >> Right, that amplification that acceleration the AI and Coupa. I got to see you about, about a year and a half ago. We were a few months into the pandemic but I'm just curious what some of the customer conversations are that you've had given the challenges with the supply chain that's on the lips of every politician and pretty much everybody. What are some of the things that Coopa has really helped customers to mitigate? >> Well, first of all, the simplest things were when everyone went home they couldn't do those paper based processes anymore. So they leverage our platform much more, right? I mean, they couldn't write paper checks for example and go in the office and do that. And that's just a simple example, order things or or get goods and services to their folks that are now working from home, for example. But then they're also faced with the acute issue of supply chain needs and the agility of their supply chain. So we help them figure out different ways to transport the goods and services they need, different freighting routes in real time through our AI capabilities. So, I mean, those are just some of the examples but we really think of our value proposition as almost like a Swiss army knife. And what happened during COVID is, you know we went out into the jungle and you didn't know which of those tools you would've needed but we tried to be right there with our customer to give them, you know, the knife, the match, the scissors, the, you know the fishing line, whatever was needed at that point in time to help them survive and thrive. And that's really how we see ourselves is you know, a true partner to our customers. >> Yeah, a true enabler. Well, I was looking at your FY22 numbers growth in new business in excess of 60% percent record annual revenue, 725, be up for up 34% subscription revenue up. Coupa up into the right. >> Well, it is, and what we're trying to be very thoughtful with this business. We're trying not to grow so fast that suddenly we leave our customers behind. We really try to take it one customer at a time, but the beauty of this growth, this measured and thoughtful growth is that this, we have an incredible renewal rate. I mean, our customers stay with us and they add more and more capabilities. And that drives an incredible cash flow situation for our business. And that makes us as Coupa very resilient. That's why we love being so transparent with our customers. Here's our growth, here's our margins, here's our cash flow. Here's how we're investing into R&D and innovation. Here's the M&A that we're doing to bring you a greater set of value propositions. And I love that transparency. It's one of the beauties of being a public company everything's out there and everyone can see and decide whether they want to be a customer, be an investor, be a colleague. It's a wonderful thing. >> Talk about the power of the community. Community AI launched in FY22. You showed some numbers and just the power of all of that anonymized, aggregated data to be analyzed. What is that? How has that really driven the evolution of Coupa in the last 13 years you've been at the helm? >> Well, we set our sites on doing this as far back as 13 years ago. I know you interviewed Donna recently and she was sharing with you that we set up our contracts with the customers in a way where we could take their anonymized sanitized data, aggregate it, and see if we can glean insights from it that could be used to the benefit of each individual customer. Really break the silos of traditional enterprise software. You know, where you do one deployment at a time and you live in your own little silo in your own little world. Now we're pushing, you know, a myriad of prescriptions out to each of our customers. They can see the best ways in real time to avoid supplier risk for example, make sure that the goods and services they buy they get on time at the right price points, make sure that the suppliers that they're working with support their diverse needs, their minority own supplier needs. All of the transparency that comes with seeing trillions of dollars in data in real time and gleaning insights from it. And we're just scratching the surface in this area. We're absolutely just scratch and service. We've pushed out this platform to our customers and now they're coming back to us and saying, wow, could I glean this sign insight from the community? What if we can get access to that information? And we're encoding that for them and pushing that information and those applications out to them. So this is going to be an exciting couple of months and quarters and years to take this concept of community AI to a completely different level. And I think it's not only new for Coupa, but I really see it as something completely new for the enterprise software industry where the opportunity to break silos is really upon us. >> It's critical, but a lot of communities are very transactional episodic, Coupa isn't like that. >> Well, you know that there's no shortcut to that. That has taken 13 years. And I think that begins with the O in Coupa which is the openness, the openness, the transparency the authenticity in which we, with which we engage with our customers. They understand how we work. They have access to all of our other customers. They can interface with them and interact with them within their own industry, within their own company size, whether they're the largest companies in the world, or you know, upper mid-market or mid-market customers whether they're subscribing to our treasury applications or our supply chain or procurement applications. And by having access to this community in real time and a community that's grounded in that trust and authenticity, you know, only great things happen. Only great things happen. >> The trust in a authenticity is critical. It's easy to say, you can trust us. We're authentic. It's a whole other thing to actually feel it and believe it and see it. And you get that sense here from your keynote. Barbara Corcoran was fantastic. Inspiring, I loved how she said she'd probably never had an original good idea herself that always gets them from others. And I thought that's Coupa to me, that's the spirit of community, the spirit of collaboration. All of those Cs to me embody what Coupa is. >> Exactly, exactly. None of us is as smart as all of us. That's what it is. No doubt. >> It's true that power of that community is. And I think I read in Fast Company just really recently that you described the community AI as a moonshot. And I thought, where is he going to go from here? (laughing) >> Well, it's continuing to build on this concept. It's really continuing to build on this concept of breaking these siloed data stores, aggregating them and distilling insights from them in ways that we ourselves as Coupa, as our R&D team or Raj and our product team we don't know all the different ways the customers will want to use this power of community. But we know we have a very scalable underlying platform that operates in virtually every language and virtually every currency that will be there to support their evolving needs. As we continue our, you know, what we hope to be lifelong relationship with our customers. >> I was talking to one of your customers. I think it was Jabil recently, and we're having them on the program today. And they actually said they were an SAP ERP shop. They could have gone the SAP route and chose Coupa. And one of the main reasons was because Coupa was going to be able to evolve with them, but allow them to help Coupa evolve. And I get that sense from a lot of your customers that we have the opportunity to influence the direction that the technology goes. Because we are here in the back office now moving to the front. >> Rob: That's right. >> In a day to day, really figuring out what if it did this? What if it did that? Now it does all of these things because the community gets to be that influential >> That's right. And we also, the beauty is we're able to help them. Our customers unlock the value of their investments into core ERP platforms, whether it be SAP or Oracle a host of other ERPs, we help them get strategic leverage from those applications. And we're building this company very much on the shoulders of early, you know, enterprise software companies like themselves. So it's really a beautiful, you know relationship with our customers, but also a way to, to give them more and more leverage >> That's critical. Especially as every company these days it has to be a data company, but they have to be able to see the data, glean insights act on it, make pivots. It's one of the words that we probably use so often in the last two years is pivot, but I think without these companies having a data strategy from a competitive perspective, their toast. >> I think so I think it's really tough. You know, I frame it very simply. We spent many, many years in the industrial revolution. We're worried about, you know, physical labor, moving parts. We entered into the information revolution with the advent you know, the internet and now I think we're really in what I would call the knowledge revolution it's, as you said, it's not only the data, but gleaning valuable insights from that massive growing data store and delivering them at the point of need so that people can take advantage of that insight and that knowledge. And, you know, we're proud to be on the forefront of that as a growing, you know, technology company, a cloud based what we call values as a service company. >> Value as service, right. You mentioned in your keynote, you were talking about the the struggles of being a parent during the pandemic and trying to get your kids to watch some of the classics. I know it was right there with you, Superman, Rocky, was it Planes, Trains & Automobiles, that's another one, and I thought you mentioned, you know my kids had about three minutes of attention span. I thought in the business world, people have three seconds. The real time, get me what I need in the point of time when they need it. Is critical for every business in every industry because the consumer is so, our demands are just higher and higher. >> That's right. That's right. And you know, the U in Coupa stands for user centricity and the logic there was simply, if the machine could do the majority of the work there should be less and less stress upon the end user the user themselves, as I say, deliver exactly what they need at the point of need to them on the screen or on their phone or wherever it is so that they could keep business moving forward as efficiently thoughtfully and optimally as possible. And you know we take the responsibility as a value of service company, you know very seriously try to make sure that we optimize the time spent of the sort of the man machine, woman machine interaction then less and less is on the, on the man or woman, and much much more is on the, you know the platform that we continue to develop. >> One of the things I read that you said in the press release I think it was yesterday's, chief financial officers, chief information officers, CEOs, they need to be chief transformation officers. That's a hard thing to do, especially for, I can imagine organizations like I had Casey's General Store on, this is a company that was founded in the fifties. How are you seeing that manifest into reality when you're talking with those CFOs and CEOs, are they really becoming those chief transformation officers? >> Well, they're all aspiring to it and we're, in my view proudly helping them move as quickly as possible toward that end, to have companies that are highly agile, that can respond to shift and consumer demands, consumer needs, shifting supply chain, you know, challenges, shifting financial scenarios out in the marketplace given the volatility of the stock market. So if we could offer that agility and resiliency and that additional stool of digital transformation for CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, and, you know we're doing something special out there. >> So Rob, last question for you. What does tomorrow look like for Coupa? What are we going to see and feel next year? Any crystal ball insight you can share with me? >> You know, I don't know. One of the things about us is we're not we're a little bit of a boring company. It's one quarter after the next week. >> I saw the dancing video that is not boring. (Rob laughing) >> But you know, it's been what, 52 quarters of going at it, one quarter at a time, one customer at a time one interaction at a time, one line of code at a time, you know, one QA assurance at a time, one support ticket at a time just moving forward moving forward, moving forward. And before, you know, it, you turn around, you look around and we began as you know, know a couple of handfuls of people with a desire to inspire an industry is starting to take shape. And we feel like, you know, we're not just getting started, but we're certainly in the early innings of I think creating a very special company and more importantly, a very special community around the company that we're forming. I would say a very special community. Rob, great to have you on the program, congrats on doing the event in person, getting all of these people that are so ready to see you guys and to be able to interact with Coupa and its partner ecosystem, getting us all together. One of my favorite events, we appreciate you stopping by on the CUBE. >> Thank You. Thanks for having me again. >> All right. For Rob Bernshteyn, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of day two Coupa Inspire 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around. My next guest will join me shortly. (lighthearted music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, covering Coupa Insp!re 2022. theCUBE is really happy to be here at this event. About 2,500 folks are here, which is great to see. I have two guests from Microsoft with me. Please, welcome Jonathan Allen, the director of global network modeling design and planning, and Cassie Wang, senior global network model and design engineer. Guys, thanks so much for joining me today. >> No problem. Thanks Lisa for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's talk about what's going on at Microsoft, the Microsoft supply chain. Supply chain is a term that's on everyone's lips these days for some interesting reason, but talk to me a little bit about the Microsoft supply chain and how does it scale to meet the needs of business? >> Yeah, Lisa, it's really an interesting design at Microsoft. When you look at all the products we service, from Xbox consoles, controllers, Xbox games, Xbox Live cards, service devices for retail customers, for consumer customers and commercial customers. And then the way we go to market through distributors, retailers, and direct to consumer homes, we have to have a supply chain that actually executes across all the products and customer needs based on seasonality. When you think about our products, Xbox console heavy Christmas, heavy consumer, heavy retail commercial devices for service, heavy quarter ends, heavy periods of time back to school. So, we have to have a supply chain that effectively works across all of our products, all of our customers, and all the differences analogies that we have to manage. >> And do so globally? >> And do so globally. >> So talk to me about the transformation. That's a word that we talk a lot about digital transformation, right? >> Yes. >> Before COVID, now we've seen the acceleration of digital transformation during COVID, we've seen challenges with the supply chain. Talk to me about Microsoft supply chain journey from a digitalization perspective, what you guys have gone through. >> Yeah, absolutely. Data is the key. And I have a philosophy which is around managing a business by facts and figures. And so, when Cassie first came on about a year and a half ago, our focus was on digitizing our supply chain. So how do you take our physical supply chain, digitize it in a way that you have a digital mapping and a duplication of what's happening physically in a digital way across the supply chain. So about every single day, we're grabbing in about 500 gigabytes of data, that then allows us to understand the physical and the virtual world of our supply chain, to understand how it's moving, how it's executing and how it's delivering. As for example, we were able to, when the war began in Ukraine, to understand where our trains were, how they were moving, and if they were continuing to move versus stopping. On the second side, we're leveraging that data now to make decisions about where our supply chain is today, which is really focused in the changing environments that are real time occurring. That's driving opportunities, whether it's about reducing carbon, whether it's driving cost down or whether it's servicing the customers to make real time decisions, while at the same time planning for three to five years out based on our growth, our projections, and making sure we'll have the right infrastructure partner supply chain in place to service with those changes in growth. >> Basically you need a crystal ball? >> Basically. >> Essentially? >> Yes. >> And Cassie, it sounds like from what Jonathan just said, you joined the team during the pandemic? >> Yes. >> So, during a time of massive change? >> Fully remote, yeah. Talk to me a little bit about that and some of the opportunities that you saw in helping the supply chain modernization. >> Yeah, definitely. So when I joined Microsoft, it's great time. And it's all the risks and challenges and dynamic changing environment that's really involved. So we spent a long time, like from the time I joined Microsoft, we spent the time to set up this digital chain of our supply chain. So really to transform what is happening physically to how do we see it digitally. So just to bring the visibility of the supply chain. So the great thing is we are able to leverage the tool from Coupa, the digital transformation and also supply chain design optimization tool to help us really build the digital twin, and also the model for Microsoft device supply chain. >> Now, interesting comment. So when I met Casie, the first time I met her, was in person when I interviewed her. Second time I met her in person was here at Coupa, and I was afraid I wouldn't recognize her. (all laughing) >> Of course, challenges of last year. Talk to me about speaking of challenges, talk to me about some of the challenges that Microsoft saw and said, "We need a partner like Coupa to help us eliminate these challenges. We don't have time. Real time is no longer nice to have. We've got to be able to transform, so we have that visibility in real time." >> Absolutely. When you think about time, time and decisions, overnight, cities get locked down in China, cities get locked down in Europe. And if you wait days or wait hours, that could be the difference between product on a boat, product on a plane, or product not arriving to support your customer needs. >> Right. And then the question is knowing that with that real time, how are you making decisions real time to change, to alternate airports? Making changes on the products you're making to make sure that, I was making this but now I should make this, because I have a risk of getting product to show. >> And you've got to do all that with very limited amount of time. And of course, cause there's the consumer. I mean, we think about the Microsoft on the business side but the consumer side, you mentioned some of the consumer products you don't offend the Xbox, the service consumers. One of the things that was really in short supply during the pandemic and probably still is to some degree, is patience. >> Yes. >> The consumer experience is so critical for a brand. >> Correct. >> And as is the employee experience. >> Yes. >> Talk to me a little bit about, from a supply chain digitization perspective, what was some of the executive sponsorships? Who were some of those executive sponsors that were involved in going, "Yeah, we need to move in this direction with Coupa, and it's got to be now."? >> The real supporter behind that is, my manager, Jeff Davidson, and then his leader, which is Donna Wharton, where they are truly about what are we doing next? How are we going to leverage the tools and the capabilities that are provided by others that allow us to do our job? So let's be clear on, let's use those that are designed to do what they're supposed to do, and then build where we need to. And that was the big difference, the digitization of the data, create the data, create the information so that we could then leverage the tools to create the information, right? And that information is then about bringing the facts, the information and the data forward, to have very fact-based conversations, which is back to manage the business by facts and figures. >> Right. Well, Cassie, one of the things that we've also learned in the last couple years, is that every company is a data company. If they're not a data company they're probably not going to be around. I even think of my grocery store and all that data that they have on me to be able to surface up. What did I buy last time, and I want to buy that again? Talk to me a little bit about why was Coupa the right choice to help facilitate this data strategy so that the visibility and the supply chain and the ability to tweak things on demand is there? >> Yeah. So, the main stuff that we are leveraging from Coupa are the data group and also the supply chain group. So data group enable us to really, for the people who do not have a intensive data manipulation backgrounds, they can use data group very straightfowardly to work on the data so they can build, they can grab the data transactional level and aggregate to the leadership level to see data in different aspects, tell the trends to get the key information. So that's the power of getting the massive data on a level that's like everybody can say, "Oh, wow! This is what it means." And another is definitely leveraging the data to get into a model, which is what we just talked about, the digital twin of our physical supply chain. So, we are able to like make analysis based on very easy design, like sensitive analysis, what-if analysis, to test out what our future supply chain can be. And what is the cost benefits? What is all the impacts on the on the lead times? On the carbons? So, yeah. So that's the power of leveraging the data. >> Speaking of carbons, how is Microsoft working towards being carbon negative, zero waste? What's some of the things that are going on there from a corporate responsibility perspective? >> Yeah, that's a really important one. As known about two years ago, we came out with a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030. >> 2030. >> And so, the company as a whole is doing massive initiatives from different groups, but specifically in supply chain, we're constantly focusing on cutting our carbon footprint, whether it's the way we're making the products and designing the products, whether it's the way that we're designing our warehouses. So for example, just recently, we launched a Carbon Neutral DC in Europe, which is all solar panel based. We're about to do that as well in one of our US operations. We're working on other things that allow us to think about alternative pallets that eliminate the weight of wood, to a much lighter pallet that has a huge carbon reduction when you think about shipping things via the air and the carbon impact there. So, everything that we work on is really around three things; service, cost and sustainability. And our biggest objective is really taking all three of those objectives and trying to bring them closer to each other so that the decisions aren't as large against each other when you make one versus the other. That's our objective. So, how do we continue to move that ball forward, challenge the paradigms of the old, that we're so accustomed to and really move forward to changing? >> How does Coupa help with that? >> Oh, I can't say that, yeah. >> Yeah, so one of the actual dimensions, Microsoft our goal is to achieve carbon neutral by 2030. So traditionally, the trade off might be between cost and service, right? >> Okay. And now, the carbon is the most important priority. So the trade off, the balance, are between cost, service, time and carbon. So one of the great thing that Coupa can help us is in the network modeling. There is actually objective for lowering the carbon emissions. So that can be the top priority that you wanted to solve through your network modeling like in parallel to cost, to service. So you can just like very straightforwardly put more weight into carbon when you're making your decisions, like that can be a higher penalty cost when you have more carbon emissions. It's like a very straightforward way to translate the carbon goal into some quantifiable goal into the modeling and data. >> Jonathan, I'm curious from a Microsoft strategic partnership perspective, how important is it from Microsoft to partner with companies that have that strong commitment to help facilitate being carbon neutral by 2030, having a strong ESG initiative? >> It's critical. Microsoft for the most part is an outsourced supply chain in which we measure partners across the network. We have our partners run our distribution and centers, we have outsource manufacturing, we have outsourced logistics. And it's important that we're working with them about what their plans are, because they're just simply an extension of the Microsoft supply chain. >> Right. >> Right. They're not not just companies we work with, they're companies we partner with, to think about how can we change the future? What are the alternatives that we can do? How do we think about alternative fuels? How do we think about alternative shipping ways? How do we think about creating density in the network? So one of the biggest things when you really think about optimization is really around creating deensity. How do I create more with less, and make sure I'm taking, for every dollar spent, for every shipment made, I maximize it to its fullest, and leave no waste behind it? That's the goal. And so, partners challenging us is probably the most important piece because they're on the front line. They actually see our shipments, they see our loads, they see the work we're doing and how it's translating to their environment. And it's important that they give us that hard feedback back that allows us know where we're not meeting the bar. >> Got it. Cassie, you guys are giving a presentation in about a couple of hours. Talk to me about some of the things that the audience, like if you had to summarize the top three takeaways that the audience is going to learn from the top, what would they be? >> I think the first is sustainability. So we want everybody to know that this is the key mission for Microsoft. That's one of the priorities for the next eight years for Microsoft to achieve. And the second is just how Coupa can help us achieve that goal. And how do we leverage the the applications, the tools, the cutting edge technologies for us to achieve a sweet balance between sustainability and technology supplychain? >> I think one of the greatest things about conferences like this, is that Coupa is great with that customer centricity, is it the opportunity to hear from the voice of the customer? What challenges you had? Why you chose Coupa? How you resolved them? And that crystal ball that you talked about in terms of where we're going from here. I think that there's so much value. I'm sure in what you're going to share today with the audience. Jonathan, last question for you, for other folks in any industry that are about to embark on, or are in the midst of a supply chain, digital transformation, what's your advice? What recommendations would you give? >> For me, it's really about two things. First and foremost is about creating data. Focus on data, not an answer, not a conversation. What is the information that you require? And then the second piece about that is then how do you make sure you stitch it together? And how you create, whether it's manufacturing data, whether it's purchase order data, whether it's sales order data, whether it's shipment data, whatever it is, making sure that you can stitch end-to-end together, because each individual decision by itself, may be right, but could be wrong, because ultimately, it's about the decision for the whole, not the decision for the one. And then making sure you focus on the cultural change, which is around, it's just not my area, it's just not my thing, it's about the end, it's about the planet, it's about Microsoft, it's about the customer, it's about the future, and making sure you're really really focused on making that change, right? Not my change. >> Right, and Rob Bernstein even alluded to that a little bit this morning in his keynote talking about one of the things that Coupa breaks is silos. >> Yes. >> Organizations that, cause to your point, something might be really good for sales or operations, but not good for marketing or logistics, for example, need to be able to have that visibility across, but also another thing that Coupa is famous for is collaboration. >> Correct. >> Being able to enable that collaboration across lines of business, across teams, across partners. >> Yep. And an important statement of that is, when you think about change, think of it like a stream, right? Streams, they create pathways with persistence. When you believe in something and you're truly behind it, just stay the path, right? There'll be a time and a place, cause sometimes the decisions just aren't now, but they will become. There's a lot of things that, for example, myself and Cassie are constantly working on, that might not be right now, but they will be right in the future. And it takes sometimes, just the right opportunity, the right situation, but the key is making ysure you understand those things so when those opportunities present themselves, you can just step in. >> Yep. Another thing we've learned, I think in the last two years, I'm losing count, is it's not a matter of if, but when. >> Correct. >> And you can apply that general statement to pretty much anything these days. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking about Microsoft's transformation of the supply chain, the digital twin that you've created. Have a great time in your session. I'm sure folks are going to learn a lot from you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, my pleasure. For Jonathan Allen and Cassie Wang, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the the CUBE's coverage of Coupa Insp!re 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around, be right back with my next guest. (upbeat msuic)

>>Welcome back to HP discover 2021 the virtual version. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube. We're here with Manav said Donna, who is the global head of sales and market development for cognitive business operations at Tata consultancy services Tcs. And we're gonna dig in to digital transformation and take a deeper dive into the customer journeys. Welcome Manav, >>thank you. Dave, thank you for inviting me to this. Uh appreciate and looking forward to have an intriguing dialogue. You Me too. >>Me too. I mean we talk about digital transformation all the time prior to the pandemic. You know, a lot of it was kind of buzz wordy um and there's a lot of complacency around it. But as we know if you weren't digital during the pandemic you're out of business but people were forced into it. They were rushed into I called the force marched the digital so you really didn't have time to be planned full. And now people are stepping back and saying, okay now we have an opportunity to get digital right and put that in air quotes. How do you think about digital transformation? What do you mean by that? >>Okay, see I think uh the way we look at it at this, yes, I will, I will probably take a step back where in um while the digital transformation has been in play, not just over the last year since the pandemic began, but um even before then uh where the shift uh in the customer organization that we have been seeing is largely from being product centric to be purpose centric, wherein the whole focus of the entire existence is to be able to serve the purpose for their consumers, their customers and so on and so forth. And and if you look at it, for example, total energies right? The looking to sell or produce fuel. They are looking to be responsible energy company producing, reliable, affordable and clean energy for the consumers. Right? Similarly, there are other examples damaged shipyards who are looking to be more of a maritime solutions provider rather than just a shipbuilding company. Uh, so, so what's really happening when the purpose is being the driving force behind any organizations agenda or even reason of existence? That purpose is actually the driving force also followed the digital transformation. That is basically shifting the pace of the way businesses are looking to drive consumer experiences, time to market and so on, so forth. Right? And if you see our we launched our new brand positioning in the last quarter, that's building on belief and and that's basically centered around this whole purpose driven mindset. What that means is that we believe that and then the technology is enabling digital transformation are going to be the pillar of the whole shift of the re imagination of the business models wearing businesses are coming together across industries and driven by the key goal of serving the customer in terms of driving the enhanced experience rather than just selling a product. So that's basically is really happening. And having said that now in the last year or so, what pandemic has done is basically accelerated the pace by a condom. Deep right? So so in that sense, some of the organizations that were not ready at that point, they are also kind of transformation and and and taking that leap frog, I would say so from that perspective and going by again by our brand positioning statement, building on belief, right? That's really helping towards that pretty good thing, the overall journey, three horizon business and I'll come to that in a minute, but I hope it is answering your question of what digital transformation and how pandemic has really helped it. >>I just want to get 1 um point of clarification you said and you cut out there for a second, you said go from product centric too, >>but to centric >>platform centric, got it, >>but centric >>purpose centric uh building on belief, got it. Okay, so something else you said they picked up on, you talked about um actually you know crossing industries and this is something that's new and that's enabled by digital. I want to get your thoughts on it. I mean if you look at industry structures historically, whether it's manufacturing or automotive or financial services or healthcare or media and entertainment, whatever it is, there was a value chain, there is a value chain that's built up in that business might be uh it might be R. And D. Sales and marketing, service, manufacturing, etcetera. And if you are in that industry, you largely stayed in that industry forever. And now you're seeing these, a lot of big company, a lot of big tech companies having a dual disruption agenda, not only horizontally to from a technical standpoint, but you're seeing amazon get into grocery, you know, they're they're buying studios, you're seeing your Apple get into finance. And so the enabler is data in digital and that talks to the business model re imagination that you're talking about. >>Absolutely and absolutely exactly what is happening, that's what I'm really talking about. And we are firmly believing that boundaries or those boundaries are going to be blood even more so going forward, as I took a few examples and you also talked about Apple, or or even amazon all the for example. Right, so all these technology companies are just being disrupted. So, having, having said that, that data being the new fuel at the same time, Cloud being the new er now cloud as a technology that is enabling the business model. Re imagination is not just on the outside, but also on the red side. And and that's where the boundaries are becoming so closer between edge and the cloud. And how how do we give that flexibility for to the customers, to people to adopt those digital technologies across the enterprise? Right. That's what, that's what the ship that we have been seeing. >>How do you see ecosystems playing in this? I mean it's kind of, I know it's an overused term but it seems to me to be increasingly important, its power of many versus the resources of one or a few. How do you see ecosystems driving? You know, this, this purpose driven business you talk about? >>Um very, very closely I would say, and I'll give you examples also in that sense. Right faster. Um if I talk about the journey I mentioned briefly earlier about three horizon based journey, right. The first and foremost being the setting up the digital foundation that basically could be through the combination of cloud, iOT analytics, artificial intelligence and so on so forth. Right? And then eventually moving on to re imagination of business models and then leveraging the purpose led ecosystem. Now in the Horizon one, when we are setting up the digital foundation, that is where the whole ecosystem comes into play. Where and where and if I talk about our co innovation network partners like HP, where we are working together to really bring in that flexibility for the customers, even in on premise environment, giving them that kind of uh features that they can experience also in the cloud to be really able to leverage the whole our beat at the edge or in the cloud. So that's where the kind of ecosystem coming together and and and those are also some of the challenges that we have seen that customers are facing today to be able to achieve the first horizon in that journey. The challenges like accelerated or all the time to market challenges. Like are they able to achieve the flexibility to be able to offer to the business and and challenges? Like are they able to achieve transformation at scale or is it just appointed um pointed poc sort of thing? Right so bringing the ecosystem together is able to help customers address those challenges, be it in terms of consumption driven, addressing the flexibility needs, be it in terms of the pre integrated solutions addressing the challenges related to time to market and so on and so forth. >>Can we stay on? The challenges for a minute? As I said, pre pandemic, there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen that meme of the wrecking ball coming in and kind of a tongue in cheek joke, but but the complacency is gone, so so there's there also, but still organizational challenges. It's not complacency anymore, but what's the right regime? What's the right approach? Uh everybody wants to get digital right, but a lot of people, you know, that's a do you see that as a challenge? Actually, not knowing where to prioritize it and you know, how can you help in that regard? >>Yeah, So, and I would also like to like to talk about what we have done in in certain with certain customer with challenges. Um some of the things I'll introduce TCS Cognex here, this is our platform which basically brings together the capabilities in a pre integrated uh, for, of predefined solutions accelerators of our value builders as we call it, um, for customers to be able to just integrate their environments to be able to manage the whole infrastructure or of the landscape in a completely automated and analytics driven manner. Right, so that's that's one way of addressing those challenges. What it also does is it gives that um power to the stakeholders in the organization to be able to address the key challenge of time to market because it is giving out or coming out in a pre integrated manner and be able to achieve that benefits or realize the benefits of transformation In in an accelerated time frame instead of waiting for 18-24 months, how can it be done in 3-6 months, for example. Right. That's that's that's one set and and similarly, uh if I talk about the flexibility, right, consumption driven manner is extremely, extremely important. And if I talk about hybrid cloud, so to say right today, About 1-2% of the on premise infrastructure is actually in a consumption driven manner while cloud is always gonna consumption to a manner. The trends that we're seeing is that by next year about minimum 15% of the on premise infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment will be about or will be delivering a consumption-driven manner and and that's what is going to address the various the opportunity as well as the challenge to address that particular aspect of flexibility and that's where the ecosystem with the likes of us, teachers and HP coming together to provide solutions that are addressing those needs of our consumers. >>And when you talk about the consumption driven, obviously talking about things like HP Green Lake, that's a model that enables that kind of consumption model. You know, I feel like, I mean, I feel like that's kind of table stakes to be honest with, you, pointed out 1 to 2% of it. I said wow, clouds been around for a long time and now, but now we're seeing the rapid adoption 15% and we're also seeing, I mean I think I'll give H PE some props on this because they've got their whole company behind it, but there has to be a complimentary shift in the mindset of OK, we're not now selling boxes anymore and I think HP has done a pretty good job of this. They've made some announcements recently to that effect. They're doing an HPC. We just saw some storage announcements, so it's no longer, hey, here's a box to sell it and this is where a company like Tcs comes to play. You, you've, you've never had that box mentality, you have a solutions mentality and so, so the industry is moving in a very rapid pace now. My question is, are the customers ready for it? Are they ready for it? Because they have the cloud experience, are they ready for it on prem and what do they need to do to get ready for that? >>See um, to answer your first question already and what really is the trigger point for them being ready? The answer is yes. Okay. Um, I would say a large percentage of the customer base was ready even before pandemic, but pandemic has really made it even more prominent in the customer and that has become a need. We are seeing so many customers today. I mean, uh, in my global role, I'm seeing across industries and across markets right from north America to Australia Japan. We're in, we're in the need for having consumption. Everyone is even at on premise while cloud is definitely there, but even at on premise is so much so that really is the trigger um, at the same time now what is really driving that trigger apart from pandemic is to be able to offer that flexibility to their business. Businesses are basically reimagining, reimagining their whole uh where they are reaching out to their customers, where they are expanding into the newer markets and the speed is extremely, extremely important and that's what is really being the whole consumption, let's >>peel the onion on that. Somebody asked me this the other day why why as reserves. I said the same thing, flexibility and they're like, yeah, okay, but give me some examples. And so I said, well, first of all, they're paying by the drink. So it's a much fairer for the customer model instead of okay, charge them for what they're not even going to use or what they might use for a day or two or a month. The other is experimentation. It just seems to me that in the digital world you got to fail fast, You don't know, you don't know what, you don't know. And so these consumption models allow you to spin up experiments very quickly and cheaply and only pay for what you use is, am I, am I getting that right? >>Absolutely, Absolutely. And and and that that's exactly what the model is, that we as uh as a partner together, that we are offering. Only one thing that I would want to highlight here is, um while that's the foundation, as I said, it is setting up the digital foundation, giving the customers the flexibility. And if I talk about example, uh one of our british large, I am who really is leveraging this technology for them to be able to bring more resilience and boring traing and scales departments uh to be able to, you know, on the manufacturing line and ultimately driving to the sales value chain. So those are the things that are happening. And you took an example of basically talked about consuming purely as a service what you use. This model is basically expanding everywhere very recently. I mean I saw an out of bicycle as a service. I mean instead of buying a new bicycle, I'm just able to get one bicycle, you use it for a month, return it back to the to the owner to be able to use it only when I need it, let's say for example, so that's what is really happening even in the digital transformation, I just needed for a time basis for a particular purpose. I served that purpose, ultimately driving the business resilience, agility and then ultimately serving that purpose. Yeah, >>I think I'd love your thoughts on this. I think the real opportunity here is to for for technology companies like HP. E working with TCS to create a layer I called a layer that spans on prem name your favorite cloud or multiple clouds goes across clouds goes out to the edge. That's a layer that that hides all the underlying complexity. You're going to take care of that for me uh because it's complicated. No question about it, the bigger the universe gets, the more complicated gets. But as as a customer, I want to hide that complexity because I don't want people doing plumbing, I want people focus on on strategic initiatives and that to me, seems to be the killer app, if you will of infrastructure in the future. Is that that abstraction layer? Do you see it that way? >>Absolutely. And that's where the easiest Cognex comes into play very strongly. Right? As I said earlier, it's basically it said actually uh an air driven human machine collaboration suite. So what that really means, it is bringing together the capabilities from analytics to ai with our machine first principles and and really giving that obstructing player in a pre integrated manner from edged right up to the cloud and bringing it all together for the customers. So that that's exactly what how we are really helping the customers, um a team that, again, addressing those challenges of exploration, time to market flexibility and more importantly unifying the entire landscape into one single view if I am a C I O, or if I am a CFO, I want to see what is important to me, rather than going through multiple different dashboards support, so to say, Right, so that's what pieces Cognex, there's an important role in obstructing everything and presenting, identified you and in a draft formed service delivery model for the customers. >>So the history of TCS is pretty amazing. You guys have, I mean, the, the ascendancy of the company over the decades is actually so, so impressive now and your relationship with HP and now, of course, HP goes back, I think it goes back to the 90s. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that relationship, where it's come from, how it's evolving and where you want to see it going. >>So I think it's a um uh when you go back so long, right? Uh the only way you're able to sustain that long relationship when there is a value that we have been able to deliver to each other, and more importantly, the value that we have been able to deliver to our customers, right? And that has always been the, the mantra of the whole relationship and that continues to be going forward as well. So, so in that regard, I mean, while I would rather focus more on the future, history is definitely good, but I think going forward, um the kind of work that we're doing together to be able to solve some of our customers globally across the base across the industries is extremely valuable, both to us as well as two HP, I'm sure. And and that's where we are really looking to have uh, providing real value to our customers, not just from the technology perspective, ultimately elevating that value. How do we help them solve the business problems and not just the technology solutions? >>Well, I think we've learned that that's the 11 big thing we learned from the cloud is if you just shove all your stuff in the cloud lifted and shifted it. So what, uh, it's that operating model that you talked about earlier, that really is how you, you, you drop, you know, if you're a large company, you're talking about billions, uh, to the bottom line, not, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions, but that's, that's a game changer. I'll give you a final word enough. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, as they said, I think, um, I hope I would not end up repeating my mistake, but, but that, um, solving the business problems, leveraging technology and, and irrespective of the location where the technology is based being on edge or on the cloud. It's the whole model of addressing the customer demands and the customers need is extremely, extremely important. So that's that's what the whole mantra is and that's what is really were driving us forward together in the journey, >>major shifts in industry. Digital is is the driver and and Manav. Thanks so much for being on the cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Sure, thank you. Thank you for having me >>And thanks for being with us for HP Discover 2021 the virtual version. You're watching the Cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Keep it right there.

>>Welcome back to HP discover 2021 the virtual version. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube. We're here with Manav said Donna, who is the global head of sales and market development for cognitive business operations at Tata consultancy services Tcs. And we're gonna dig in to digital transformation and take a deeper dive into the customer journeys. Welcome Manav, >>thank you. Dave, thank you for inviting me to this. Uh appreciate and looking forward to have an intriguing dialogue. You Me too. >>Me too. I mean we talk about digital transformation all the time prior to the pandemic. You know, a lot of it was kind of buzz wordy um and there's a lot of complacency around it. But as we know if you weren't digital during the pandemic you're out of business. But people were forced into it. They were rushed into I called the force marched to digital so you really didn't have time to be planned full. And now people are stepping back and saying, okay now we have an opportunity to get digital right and put that in air quotes. How do you think about digital transformation? What do you mean by that? >>Okay. See I think uh the way we look at it at this, yes, I will, I will probably take a step back where in um while the digital transformation has been in play, not just over the last year since the pandemic began, but um even before then uh where the shift in the customer organization that we have been seeing is largely from being product centric to be purpose centric wearing the whole focus of the entire existence is to be able to serve the purpose for their consumers, their customers and so on and so forth. And and if you look at it, for example, total energies right? The looking to sell or produce fuel, they are looking to be responsible energy company producing, reliable, affordable and clean energy for the consumers. Right? Similarly, there are other examples damaged shipyards who are looking to be more of a maritime solutions provider rather than just a shipbuilding company. Uh, so, so what's really happening when the purpose is being the driving force behind any organizations agenda or even reason of existence? That purpose is actually the driving force also followed the digital transformation. That is basically shifting the pace of the way businesses are looking to drive consumer experiences time to market and so on, so forth. Right? And if you see our we launched our new brand positioning in the last quarter, that's building on belief and and that's basically centered around this whole purpose driven mindset. Uh, what that means is that we believe that and the technology is enabling digital transformation are going to be the pillar of the whole shift of the re imagination of the business models where in businesses are coming together across industries and driven by the key goal of serving the customer in terms of driving the enhanced experience rather than just selling a product. So that's basically is really happening. And having said that now in the last year or so, what pandemic has done is basically accelerated the pace by a condom leap. Right? So, so in that sense, some of the organizations that were not ready at that point, they are also kind of transformation and and and taking that leap frog, I would say so from that perspective and going by again by our brand positioning statement, building on belief, right? That's really helping towards that pretty good thing, the overall journey, three horizon business and I'll come to that in a minute, but I hope it is answering your question of what digital transformation and how pandemic has really helped it. >>I just want to get 1 um point of clarification you said and you cut out there for a second, you said go from product centric too, >>but to centric >>platform centric, got it, >>but centric >>purpose centric uh building on belief, got it. Okay, so something else you said they picked up on, you talked about um actually you know crossing industries and this is something that's new and that's enabled by digital. I want to get your thoughts on it. I mean if you look at industry structures historically, whether it's manufacturing or automotive or financial services or healthcare or media and entertainment, whatever it is, there was a value chain, there is a value chain that's built up in that business might be uh it might be R. And D. Sales and marketing, service, manufacturing, etcetera. And if you are in that industry, you largely stayed in that industry forever. And now you're seeing these, a lot of big company, a lot of big tech companies having a dual disruption agenda, not only horizontally to from a technical standpoint, but you're seeing amazon get into grocery, you know, they're they're buying studios, you're seeing your Apple get into finance, and so the enabler is data and digital and that talks to the business model re imagination that you're talking about. >>Absolutely and absolutely exactly what is happening, that's what I'm really talking about. And we are firmly believing that boundaries or those boundaries are going to be blood even more so going forward as I took a few examples and you also talked about Apple, or or even amazon all the for example. Right, so all these technology companies are just being disrupted. So, having, having said that, that data being the new fuel at the same time, cloud being the new er now cloud as a technology that is enabling the business model re imagination is not just on the outside, but also on the edge side. And and that's where the boundaries are becoming so closer between edge and the cloud. And how how do we give that flexibility for to the customers to be able to adopt those digital technologies across the enterprise? Right. That's what, that's what the ship that we have been seeing. >>How do you see ecosystems playing in this? I mean it's kind of, I know it's an overused term but it seems to me to be increasingly important, its power of many versus the resources of one or a few. How do you see ecosystems driving? You know, this, this purpose driven business you talk about? >>Um very, very closely I would say, and I'll give you examples also in that sense. Right faster. Um if I talk about the journey I mentioned briefly earlier about three horizon based journey, right? The first and foremost being the setting up the digital foundation that basically could be through the combination of cloud, iOT analytics, artificial intelligence and so on, so forth. Right? And then eventually moving on to re imagination of business models and then leveraging the purpose let ecosystem Now in the Horizon one when we are setting up the digital foundation that is where the whole ecosystem comes into play. Where and where and if I talk about our co innovation network partners like HP, where we are working together to to really bring in that flexibility for the customers even in on premise environment, giving them that kind of uh features that they can experience also in the cloud to be really able to leverage the whole our beat at the edge or at the clouds. So that's where the kind of ecosystem coming together and and and those are also some of the challenges that we have seen that customers are facing today to be able to achieve the first horizon in that journey. The challenges like accelerated or or the time to market challenges. Like are they able to achieve the flexibility to be able to offer to the business and and challenges? Like are they able to achieve transformation at scale or is it just appointed um pointed poc sort of thing? Right. So bringing the ecosystem together is able to help customers address those challenges, be it in terms of consumption driven, addressing the flexibility needs be it in terms of the pre integrated solutions addressing the challenges related to time to market and so and so forth. >>Can we stay on the challenges for a minute? As I said, pre pandemic. There was a lot of complacency. We've all seen that meme of the wrecking ball coming in and kind of a tongue in cheek joke, but but the complacency is gone, so so there's there also, but still organizational challenges. It's not complacency anymore, but what's the right regime, what's the right approach? Uh everybody wants to get digital right, but a lot of people, you know, that's a do you see that as a challenge? Actually not knowing where to prioritize it and you know, how can you help in that regard? >>Yeah, So, and I would also like to like to talk about what we have done in in certain with certain customer with challenges. Um, some of the things I'll introduce TCS Cognex here, this is our platform which basically brings together the capabilities in a pre integrated uh, for of predefined solutions accelerators of our value builders as we call it, um, for customers to be able to just integrate their environments to be able to manage the whole infrastructure or of the landscape in a completely automated and analytics driven manner. Right, so that's that's one way of addressing those challenges. What it also does is it gives that um power to the stakeholders in the organization to be able to address that key challenge of time to market because it is giving out or coming out in a pre integrated manner and be able to achieve that benefits or realize the benefits of transformation In in an accelerated time frame instead of waiting for 18-24 months, how can it be done in 3-6 months, for example. Right, that's that's that's one set and and similarly, uh if I talk about the flexibility, right, consumption driven manner is extremely, extremely important. And if I talk about hybrid cloud, so to say right today, about 1 to 2% of the on premise infrastructure is actually in a consumption driven manner while cloud is always gonna consumption driven manner, The trends that we're seeing is that by next year about minimum 15% of the on premise infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment will be about or will be delivering a consumption-driven manner and that's what is going to address the various the opportunity as well as the challenge to address that particular aspect of flexibility and that's where the ecosystem with the likes of us pcs and HP coming together to provide solutions that are addressing those needs of our consumers. >>And when you talk about the consumption driven, obviously talking about things like HP Green Lake, that's a model that enables that kind of consumption model. You know, I feel like, I mean, I feel like that's kind of table stakes to be honest with, you, pointed out 1 to 2% of it. I said wow, clouds been around for a long time and now, but now we're seeing the rapid adoption 15% and we're also seeing, I mean I think I'll give H PE some props on this because they got their whole company behind it, but there has to be a complimentary shift in the mindset of OK, we're not now selling boxes anymore and I think HP has done a pretty good job of this. They've made some announcements recently to that effect. They're doing an HPC. We just saw some storage announcements so it's no longer, hey, here's a box to sell it and this is where a company like Tcs comes to play. You, you've, you've never had that box mentality, you have a solutions mentality and so, so the industry is moving in a very rapid pace now. My question is, are the customers ready for it? Are they ready for it? Because they have the cloud experience, are they ready for it on prem and what do they need to do to get ready for that? >>See um, to answer your first question already and what really is the trigger point for them being ready? The answer is yes. Okay. Um, I would say a large percentage of the customer base was ready even before pandemic, but pandemic has really made it even more prominent in the customer and that has become a need, We are seeing so many customers today, I mean, uh, in my global role, I'm seeing across industries and across markets right from north America to Australia japan. We're in, we're in the need for having consumption. Everyone is even at on premise while cloud is definitely there, but even at on premise is so much so that really is the trigger um, at the same time now what is really driving that trigger apart from pandemic is to be able to offer that flexibility to their business. Businesses are basically reimagining, reimagining their whole uh where they are reaching out to their customers where they are expanding into the nuclear markets and the speed is extremely, extremely important. And that's what is really putting the whole, let's >>peel the onion on that. Somebody asked me this the other day why why as reserves? I said the same thing, flexibility and they're like, yeah, okay, but give me some examples. And so I said, well, first of all, they're paying by the drink. So it's a much fairer for the customer model instead of okay, charge them for what they're not even gonna use or what they might use for a day or two or a month. The other is experimentation. It just seems to me that in the digital world you got to fail fast, you don't know, you don't know what, you don't know. And so these consumption models allow you to spin up experiments very quickly and cheaply and only pay for what you use is. Am I am I getting that right? >>Absolutely, Absolutely. And and and that that's exactly what the model is, that we as well as the partner together, that we are offering. Only one thing that I would want to highlight here is um while that's the foundation, as I said, it is setting up the digital foundation, giving the customers the flexibility. And if I talk about example, uh one of our british large, uh I am who really is leveraging this technology for them to be able to bring more resilience and boring the lettering and scales, departments uh to be able to, you know, on the manufacturing line and ultimately driving to the sales value chain. So those are the things that are happening. And you took an example of basically talked about consuming purely as a service. What you use. This model is basically expanding everywhere very recently. I mean I saw an out of bicycle as a service. I mean instead of buying a new bicycle, I'm just able to get one bicycle, you use it or for a month, return it back to the to the owner to be able to use it only when I need it, let's say for example, so that's what is really happening even in the digital transformation, I just need it for a time basis for a particular purpose. I served that purpose, ultimately driving the business resilience, agility and then ultimately serving that purpose. Yeah, >>I think I'd love your, your thoughts on this. I think the real opportunity here is to for for technology companies like HP, working with TCS to create a layer I called a layer that spans on prem name your favorite cloud or multiple clouds goes across clouds goes out to the edge, that's the layer that that hides all the underlying complexity. You're going to take care of that for me uh because it's complicated. No question about it, the bigger the universe gets, the more complicated gets. But as as a customer, I want to hide that complexity because I don't want people doing plumbing, I want people focus on on strategic initiatives and that's, to me, seems to be the killer app if you will of infrastructure in the future. Is that that abstraction layer? Do you see it that way? >>Absolutely. And that's where the easiest Cognex comes into play very strongly. Right? As I said earlier, it's basically it said actually uh an air driven human machine collaboration suite. So what that really means, it is bringing together the capabilities from analytics to ai with our machine first principles and and really giving that obstructing layer in a pre integrated manner from edged right up to the cloud and bringing it all together for the customers. So that that's exactly what how we are really helping the customers, um a team that again, addressing those challenges of exploration, time to market flexibility and more importantly unifying the entire landscape into one single view. If I am a C I O, or if I am a CFO, I want to see what is important to me, rather than going to multiple different dashboard support so to save. Right? So that's where pieces Cognex plays an important role in obstructing everything and presenting that unified do and in a transformed service delivery model for the customers. >>So the history of TCS is pretty amazing. You guys have, I mean, the, the ascendancy of the company over the decades is actually so, so impressive. Now in your relationship with HP and now, of course, HP goes back, I think it goes back to the 90s, maybe you could talk a little bit about that relationship, where it's come from, how it's evolving and where you want to see it going. >>So I think it's uh, when you go back so long, right? Uh the only way you're able to sustain that long relationship when there is a value that we have been able to deliver to each other, and more importantly, the value that we have been able to deliver to our customers, right? And that has always been the, the mantra of the whole relationship and that continues to be going forward as well. So, so in that regard, I mean, while I would rather focus more on the future, history is definitely good, but I think going forward, um the kind of work that we're doing together to be able to solve some of our customers globally across the base across the industries is extremely valuable, both to us as well as two HP, I'm sure, and that's where we are really looking to have uh, providing real value to our customers, not just from the technology perspective, ultimately elevating that value. How do we help them solve the business problems and not just the technology solutions? >>Well, I think we've learned that that's the 11 big thing we learned from the cloud is if you just shove all your stuff in the cloud lifted and shifted it. So, what, um, it's that operating model that you talked about earlier, that really is how you, you you drop, you know, if you're a large company, you're talking about billions to the bottom line, not hundreds of thousands or millions, but that's that's a game changer. I'll give you a final word enough. >>Absolutely, Absolutely. I mean, as they said, I think, um, I hope I will not end up repeating my mistake, but, but that, um, solving the business problems, leveraging technology and, and irrespective of the location where the technology is based being on edge or on the cloud. It's the whole model of addressing the customer demands and the customers need is extremely, extremely important. So that's that's what the whole mantra is and that's what is really driving us forward together in the journey. >>Major shifts in industry digital is is the driver and and Manav thanks so much for being on the cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Sure, thank you. Thank you for having me >>And thanks for being with us for HP Discover 2021 the virtual version. You're watching the Cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Keep it right there. >>Mhm.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, David Vellante here and welcome to the special CUBE conversation with a colleague and friend of mine, Randy Seidl is a accomplished CEO, he's an executive, sales pro, and he's a founder of the Sales Community, this newly formed social network, Randy, good to see you again, welcome. >> Hey, great to see you, it's been a lot of great years, great relationship with you and congratulations with all your success with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I was remembering back, I think it's been probably since 1985, so 35 years ago when we were both Cub Scouts, I was at EMC, and you were at IDC. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love where you are, your man-cave there, we heard you held a great little networking event that you do periodically with some of our joint colleagues. And yeah, wow, we were both in our twenties, I was a young pop and Dicky Eagan, and Jack and Mike, and they would have me talk to you guys, you know, sort of brief you on the market, what little I knew now looking back. But wow, Randy, I mean. >> We knew! >> Right, I mean, and then just the whole thing just took off, but we had a good instinct, that storage was going to matter, everything back then was mainframe and IBM was the king of the world, and then you guys just crushed it. Wow, what a run, amazing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So tell me about Sales Community. What are you trying to accomplish with this new social network? >> Well, it was kind of really my COVID moment. I was talking to Peter Bell I know, you know well as well, and it was right in the beginning of COVID we were kind of comparing notes and long story short, he said, hey Randy, you do all this work with these technology companies, and channel partners, and use your customers, CIO, CTO, CSOs, but you're really not doing much for those that you know the best, which are really technology sales professionals, CROs, STRs kind of up and down the food chain. And that really got me thinking, then he introduced me to one of his companies that sells to CROs and I was going through with them and they were kind of calling me on the carpet saying, okay, do I really know these people? I'm like, oh my gosh! They basically just said, I'm a dope, I haven't really done anything here. So, one thing led to another and ended up developing a Sales Community, a big thing and big help for me was talking to probably 150 or so during the course of the summer, CROs, VPs of sales, Reps STRs to really kind of help get some feedback from them in terms of I caught now they call product-market fit, but kind of what they think it's missing, what's needed, what are their teams need, what do they want? So, it's kind of all a perfect storm, which to be honest without COVID probably wouldn't have created Sales Community. >> Well, I joined and it was a great onboarding experience and love participating with colleagues. I mean, sales is hard, I mean, you've got your ups and your downs and you just got to keep pressing on, but who's participating in Sales Community. >> We're targeting STRs on up to CROs and the kind of the tagline is learn more so you can sell more. We have a lot of great different kind of content areas and we're going to kind of bob and weave based on the feedback that we get, but we've got some great virtual events and interviews. We have an executive coach, Tony Jerry, who's doing nine sessions on designing your life. We did a recording, a live session last week on personal goal setting. We did one yesterday, it was a live session that'll be posted shortly on strategic health. Next one's on branding, so that's not necessarily specific to tech sales, but kind of adding value. We also have Dave Knorr, another executive coach doing a weekly interview series that we're calling tech sales insights with some of the leading CROs, CEOs, Jim Sullivan, who I know you know well, he's going to be the first one, it's going to be next Wednesday, he runs a NWN and he's done a lot of great things and a lot of other great leaders from there. Also still on the interview virtual events side, Michael Cotoia from Tech Target he's going to do a CMO insights series. His Tech Target International editors are also going to do regional ones. So CIO interviews from AMEA, Asia Pac, Latin America, Australia, also on the CSO side, we have somebody focused on doing a CSO interviews, Paul Salamanca of channel interviews, I think this channel, by and large gets missed a lot. CEO's and then Steve Duplessie, I know you know well as well is going to do and focus on CIO, sub-CIO insights, but basically creating virtual events and interview series that are really targeted at people that we sell to. So that covers the kind of virtual event and interview side. And I maybe more quickly go through some of the other key segments. So another one is a content library. There's the guy who's a STR at ServiceNow went through, send me note the other day that said, hey, I found out you have some great feedback on prospecting cold calling, I shared it with my team helped me a lot. So a lot of good things in terms of content library, also opportunity to network. So you could be say selling to Fidelity, you could send a note to the community and members and say anybody else trying to sell the Fidelity, let's network, let's compare notes, also great opportunities for channel partners. So channel partner could raise their hand and say, hey, I know Fidelity, let me help with you. A lot of sharing of best practices. And also just in terms of communication, slack channels, and then opportunities to create round tables. So you might have CROs from startups that want to have maybe six to 10 of them get together. So they can kind of commiserate, ask questions, you could have CROs, companies that are maybe transforming going from on-prem to kind of SAS model. So a lot of different great things, ultimately really to serve the folks in the tech Sales Community. >> Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, first of all tons of content, the other thing I like about it is we all read books on sales, some of them are so like gimmicky, some of them are inspirational. Some of them have really great suggestions. Some of them can be life changing, but what's always been missing in my opinion, is this notion of a network, a social network, if you will, where people can help each other, you just gave a ton of good examples. So you're really trying to differentiate from a lot of the things that have worked over the years, but have really sort of one way communication, some sales guru either training or you're reading his or her book. >> Yes, and we're also fortunate on the content side, we have some of the best kind of consulting sales methodology companies that love what we're doing. So they're likewise providing a lot of content and as you said, it's crazy. You think of any other industry, restaurant, hotel, lawyers, landscape, they have these big, kind of user groups, even technology companies user groups within the larger field of technology sales enterprise B2B sales, there's really nothing that looks like this that exists. So far the feedback's been great. >> Well, so just to what you're describing, I mean, I've known you for a long, long time, and one of the principles of great salespeople is, you help others, right? You make as many friends as you can, and you're the master of that. But essentially you're bringing a lot of the things that have worked, a lot of the principles that have worked in your career to this community. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I mean, especially I think some of the younger sales folks, it's not kind of off the cuff as we know, but it's really kind of training, being disciplined, being prepared, what are you going to do, how are you going to do it in this COVID moment? You know, I'm seeing lots of friends where the companies that have great relationships, they can do really well and kind of lean in a lot. If you're kind of cold calling and this environment, and it's tough, so kind of, how can you be best prepared, how can you do the best homework? How can you have the kind of right agenda, when you're going to do the sales calls? And then it's not really as much follow up, but really follow through in terms of what you do afterwards. So kind of what is the training? What can you do, how can you do it? And, you know, it's crazy, a lot of companies spend lots of money on training, but if you think about it they're really tied in specifically to tech sales, hopefully this will be great. Plus being able to just kind of throw out questions here and there works out well as well. >> Well that's what I'm looking forward to, say, hey, I got some challenges, how do others deal with this? You know, one of the things that is, I think, paramount to being a great salesperson is the attitude you hear it all the time. How do you stay pumped up? (laughing) Like I said before, we've all been through ups and downs, and what do you tell people there? >> In terms of staying pumped up, interestingly enough, the session we did yesterday on strategic health, probably plays a key role. So yeah, there's the work aspects and how are you going to focus and wake up and get fired up. But ultimately, I think you really got to take several steps back and saying are you taking care of yourself? Are you sleeping, are you eating and drinking correctly? Are you drinking enough water, are you exercising? So, in this moment, I think that's probably something that gets missed a lot in terms of getting fired up. And then ultimately just being excited about kind of what you're doing, how are you doing it, taking care of the customers and serving those around you. And you had mentioned in terms of giving it back, but a lot of us that have been around, love the idea of kind of paying it forward, helping out others and seeing a lot of the great younger folks really rise up and become stars. >> I think that's one of the most exciting things is somebody has been around for awhile. Like (laughing) we all get cold calls and say, hey, how you doing today? You know, (laughing) you really had that dead air, and you actually want to reach out and help these individuals. A lot of times they'll call you, they have no idea what you do, well I've read your website, and I think we'd be a great fit for, you know, something that would not be a great fit. So, there's a level of preparation we always talk about in sales, you got to be prepared, but there's also sometimes... I was talking to a sales pro the other day, you know, sometimes you can over prepare he said, I've been on sales calls, I prepare for hours and hours and hours, and then they get there, and it was just a lot of wasted hours. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes. I mean, so there's a really a balance there. And it comes with experience, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody could prepare hours and hours, so that's a whole different subject to think. >> Well, he said, my technique now is just 15 minutes before the call I'll jump on and just, you know, cram as much as I can. And it actually, it worked for him. So, different approaches, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd like to mention is the advisory board I'm fortunate to have a work with, and be friends with several of the best in industry like you. So if anybody goes to the website, you can click on an advisory board and there's a 200 plus and haven't count them exactly. But you know, some of the best in technology, we've got them sorted on the sales side and the channel side, the consulting side, the coaching side, analyst side, but, really just such a tremendous each head of talent that can really help us continue to go and grow and pivot and you're making sure that we are serving our Sales Community and making sure everybody's learning more so they can sell more. And then I guess I should add onto that also, earning more and making more money. >> So I got to ask you where you land on this. I mean, you're a sports fan, I am too and for a while there once the "Moneyball" came out, you saw Billy Bean and it was this sort of formulaic approach. The guy, you know, we would joke the team with the best nerds would win. But it seems like there's an equilibrium. It used to be all gut feel and experience, and then it became the data nerds. And it seems like in our industry, it's following a similar pattern, the marketing ops, Martech, becoming very, very data driven. But it feels to me, Randy, especially in these COVID times that there really is this equilibrium, this balance between experience, and tribal knowledge, gut feel, network, which is something you're building and the data. How do you see that role, that CRO role, that sales role evolving, especially in the context of what I just talked about with the data nerds? (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, I think I heard two points there since you brought up Billy Bean, I forgot the guy's name, but in the movie is kind of nerd. I've got Jesse and Tucker who have been tremendously helpful for us putting together a Sales Community. But to answer the question on the CMOs side, the CMOs out there frankly not going to like this answer, but I think more and more, you see CMOs and CROs kind of separated and it's kind of different agendas, my belief is that eventually the CMO function or marketing is really going to come under sales and sales are really going to take a much more active role in driving and leveraging that marketing function in terms of what's the best bang for the buck, what are they doing, how are they doing it? And I've got a lot of friends, I won't name names, but they're not on the sales side and they're doing what they can, but they just see what I'd call it kind of wasted money or inefficiencies on the marketing side. So, if I maybe I spin that a different way, I think given kind of analytics and those companies that do have best practices, and I write things on the marketing side, you know, they're going to continue to go and grow, you know, on cert with the right sales team. So I think that you bring up a great point and that area is going to continue to evolve a lot. >> Does that principle apply to product marketing? In other words do you feel like product marketing should be more aligned with engineering or sales and maybe sales and finance, where do you land on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of old school, so I go back to Dick and Jack and Roger and Mike Rutgers, and you all in terms of, hey, you have those silos, but you get everybody at the table, kind of what we're working well together. It is interesting though in today's world, the PLG, Product-Led Growth models, where a lot of companies now are trying to get in maybe almost like a VMware, maybe BMC did in the early days where you're kind of getting into the low level developers and then kind of things bubble up so that you think Product-Led Growth model, having a lower cost insight sales model, works when I'll say the kind of the product sells itself. But I would argue, that I think some of those PLG led companies really miss out on leveraging the high end enterprise relationships, to kind of turbocharge and supersize and expedite larger sales deals, larger (indistinct). >> Well, and you mentioned earlier a channel you said a lot of times that's overlooked and I couldn't agree more, channel increasingly important. That's where a lot of the relationships live, it gives you scale, it just gives you a lot of leverage, maybe you talk about the importance of channel and how it relates to Sales Community. >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting they're really unto themselves, there's some things that are channel channel, but if you think about, you know, go to market tech sales, pick the company on average is probably half of the business goes through the channel. And it used to be way back when just kind of fulfillment, but now the best companies really are those that have the right relationships, that are adding value, that can help on the pre sales, that can help on the post sales, that can help kind of cross sale. You know, if I'm a customer, I don't want to deal with whatever five or 10 different vendors if I can have a one stop shop with one bar solution provider, partner, SI, or whatever you want to call them, you know, that certainly makes life a lot easier. And I think a lot of companies almost been kind of a second class citizen, but I think those companies that really bring them into the fold as really partners at the table, whether it be an account planning sessions, whether you're doing sales calls, but kind of leveraging that I call it a variable cost kind of off balance sheet, sales force really is where the future is going to continue to go. >> So you've been a successful individual sales contributor. You've been a CEO, you've run large sales organizations. I mean, you basically ran sales at HP for Donna Telly, and so you've seen it all, and you've been helping startups. When you look at hiring sales people, what are the attributes that you look for? Is it intelligence, is it hard work, is it coach ability? What are some of the things that are most important to you, and do you apply different attributes in different situations? What are your thoughts on that? >> Great question in a little plug, maybe for a recruiting business, top talent recruiting, (laughing) but one of the key things that we do, which I think is different from others in the recruiting side is the relationships. So a lot of people don't dig in, when we're talking to candidates, they say, well, nobody really asked me this before. And I would argue a key differentiator, and this is way before COVID, but especially now with COVID is okay, who do you have relationships with? So I could be talking to a candidate that maybe somebody is hiring, wants to cover financial services in New York. And then I'll say, okay, well, who do you know what City JPB Bay and I'll know more people than they know. And I'll probably say, just so you know, that's weird me up in Boston. I know more than the council you probably know the best. So really trying to unearth, really kind of who has the right relationships and then separate from that in terms of a reference check, being able to reference checks sooner in the process with somebody that know well firsthand, as opposed to second hand. And a lot of times I've seen even some of the larger, more expensive recruiting firms, you're kind of wait until somebody is the final say, when do an offer, then they do a reference check and they do the reference check with somebody that they don't know. And to me, I mean, that's totally useless which quite with LinkedIn today, I could be say if we're looking at you for candidate, maybe a bad example, but I don't know, we probably have a 1000 in common, and from those, we probably have 200 that we both know, well, that I could check. And when you do reference checking, it's not a maybe it's either, hey, the person is a yes, or the person's a no. So trying to do that early in the process, I think is a big differentiator. And then last and probably third piece I'd highlight is, if it's a startup company, you can't get somebody that's just from a big company. If it's a big company role, you can't get somebody that just from a small company, you got to really make sure you kind of peel back the onions and see where they're from. And you could have somebody from a big company, but they were kind of wearing a smaller division. So again, you have to kind of, you can't judge a book by the cover. You got to kind of peel back the onion. >> So Randy, how do people learn more about Sales Community? Where do they go to engage, sign up, et cetera? >> Absolutely, it's salescommunity.com. So it should be pretty straight forward. A lot of great information there. You can go subscribe, and if you like it spread the word and a lot of great content and you can ping me there. And if not I'm randy@salescommunity.com. So love to get any feedback, help out in any way we can. >> Well, I think it's critical that you're putting this network together and you are probably the best networker that I know I've seen you in action at gatherings and you really have been a great inspiration and a friend. So, Randy, thanks so much for doing the Sales Community and coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with us. >> Great, thanks Dave, appreciate it. >> All right you're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of CONMEBOL. Future ready 2020. Brought to you by combo. >>Hi and welcome back. I'm Stew Minuteman, and we're at the Cube's coverage of Con Volt Future Ready. You've got the power panel to really dig in on the product announcements that happened at the event today. Joining me? We have three guests. First of all, we have Brenda Rajagopalan. He's the vice president of products. Sitting next to him is Don Foster, vice president of Storage Solutions. And in the far piece of the panel Mersereau, vice president of Global Channels and Alliances. All three of them with Conn Volt. Gentlemen, thanks all three of you for joining us. Exactly. All right, so first of all, great job on the launch. You know, these days with a virtual event doing, you know, the announcements, the engagement with the press and analyst, you know, having demos, customer discussions. It's a challenge to put all those together. And it has been, you know, engaging in interesting watch today. So we're going to start with you. You've been quite busy today explaining all the pieces, so just at a very high level if you put this really looks like the culmination of the update with Conn Volt portfolio new team new products compared to kind of a year, year and 1/2 ago. So just if you could start us off with kind of the high points, >>thank you still, yeah, absolutely exciting day for us today. You did comrade multiple reasons for that excitement and go through that we announced an exciting new portfolio today knows to not the culmination. It's a continuation off our journey, a bunch of new products that we launched today Hyper scaler X as a new integrated data protection appliance. We've also announced new offerings in data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and complete data protection and lots of exciting updates for Hedwig and a couple of weeks like we introduced updates for metallic. So, yes, it's been a really exciting pain. Also, today happens to be the data, and we got to know that we are the leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for the ninth consecutive. I am so a lot of goodness today for us. >>Excellent. Lots of areas that we definitely want to dig deep in to the pieces done. You know, we just heard a little bit about Hedvig was an acquisition a year ago that everybody's kind of looking at and saying Okay, you know, will this make them compete against some of their traditional partners? How we get integrated in So, baby, just give us one level deeper on the Hedvig piece on what that means to the portfolio? Yeah, sure, So I >>guess I mean, one of the key things that the random mentioned was the fact that had hyper scale that's is built off the head Day files. So that's a huge milestone for us. As we teased out maybe 10 months ago. Remember, Tomball, Go on the Cube and talking about, you know, kind of what our vision and strategy was of unifying data and storage management. Those hyper hyper scale X applying is a definite milestone improving out that direction. But beyond just the hyper scale ECs, we've also been driving on some of the more primary or modern workloads such as containers and the really interesting stuff we've come out with your recently is the kubernetes native integration that ties in all of the advanced component of the head to distribute storage architecture on the platform itself across multi cloud and on premise environments, making it really easy and policy driven. Um, for Dev, ops users and infrastructure users, the tie ins applications from a group, Friction >>Great and Mercer. There's some updates to the partner program and help us understand how all of these product updates they're gonna affect the kind of the partnerships and alliances beasts that you want. >>Absolutely. So in the time since our last meeting that go in the fall, which is actually right after I had just doing combo, we spent a good portion of the following six months really talking with partners, understanding the understand the impact of the partner program that we introduced last summer, looking at the data and really looking at barriers to evolve the program, which fell around three difference specific. Once you bet one was simplicity of the simplicity of the program, simplicity of understanding, rewards, levers and so forth. The second was paying for value was really helping, helping our partners to be profitable around things like deal registration on other benefits and then third was around co investment. So making sure that we get the right members in place to support our partners and investing in practices. Another training, another enablement around combo and we launched in over these things last week is a part of an evolution of that program. Today is a great follow on because in addition to all of the program evolutions that we we launched last week now we have an opportunity with our partners to have many more opportunities or kind of a thin into the wedge to open up new discussions with our customers now around all of these different use cases and capabilities. So back to that simplification angle, really driving more and more opportunities for those partners toe specific conversations around use cases. >>Okay, for this next question, I think it makes sense for you to start. Maybe maybe Don, you can get some commentary in two. But when he's firstly the announcements, there are some new products in the piece that you discuss but trying to understand, you know, when you position it, you know, do you call the portfolio? Is it a platform? You know, if I'm an existing Conn Volt customer, you know, how do I approach this? If I use something like metallic, how does that interplay with some of the new pieces that were discussed today. >>Sure, I can take the business. I'm sure Don and mostly will have more data to it. The simplest way to think about it is as a port for you. But contrary to how you would think about portfolio as independent products, what we have is a set off data management services granular. We're very aligned to the use case, which can all inter operate with each other. So maybe launched backup and recovery and disaster recovery. These can be handled separately, purchased separately and deployed standalone or for customers who want a combination of those capabilities. We also have a complete data protection are fine storage optimization, data governance E discovery in complaints are data management services that build on top off any of these capabilities now a very differentiating factor in our platform owners. All the services that you're talking about are delivered off the same software to make it simpler to manage to the same year. So it's very easy to start with one service and then just turn on the license and go to other services so I can understand the confusion is coming from but it's all the same. The customer simplicity and flexibility in mind, and it's all delivered off the same platform. So it is a portfolio built on a single Don. Would you like to add more to it? >>Yeah, I think the interesting thing due to add on top of that is where we're going with Hedvig Infrastructure, the head of distributed storage platform, uh, to to run this point, how everything is integrated and feed and work off of one another. That's the same idea that we have. We talked about unifying data and storage manager. So the intricate storage architecture components the way data might be maneuvered, whether it's for kubernetes for virtual machines, database environments, secondary storage, you name it, um, we are. We're quickly working to continue driving that level of of unification and integration between the portfolio and heads storage, distribute storage platforms and also deliver. So what you're seeing today going back to, I think wrong his first point. It's definitely not the culmination. It's just another step in the direction as we continue to innovate and integrate this >>product, and I think for our partners what this really does, it allows them to sell around customer use cases because it'll ask now if I have a d. Our use case. I can go after just PR. If I have a backup use case, I can just go after backup, and I don't have to try to sell more than that. Could be on what the customer is looking for in parallel that we can steal these things in line with the customer use case. So the customer has a lot of remote offices. They want to scale Hedvig across those they want to use the art of the cloud. They can scale these things independently, and it really gives us a lot of optionality that we didn't have before when we had a few monolithic products. >>Excellent. Really reminds me more of how I look at products if I was gonna go buy it from some of the public cloud providers living in a hybrid cloud. World, of course, is what your customers are doing. Help us understand a little bit, you know, Mercer talked about metallic and the azure partnership, but for the rest of the products, the portfolio that we're talking about, you know, does this >>kind >>of work seamlessly across my own data center hosting providers Public Cloud, you know, how does this fit into the cloud environment for your customer? >>Yes, it does. And I can start with this one goes to, um it's our strategy is cloud first, right? And you see it in every aspect of our product portfolio. In fact, I don't know if you got to see a keynote today, but Ron from Johns Hopkins University was remarking that comment has the best cloud native architectures. And that's primarily because of the innovation that we drive into the multi cloud reality. We have very deep partnerships with pretty much all the cloud vendors, and we use that for delivering joint innovation, a few things that when you think of it from a hybrid customers perspective, the most important need for them is to continue working on pram while still leveraging the cloud. And we have a lot of optimization is built into that, and then the next step of the journey is of course, making sure that you can recover to the cloud would be it work load. Typically your data quality and there's a lot of automation that we provide to our solutions and finally, Of course, if you're already in the cloud, whether you're running a science parents or cloud native, our software protects across all those use cases, either true sass with metallic auto downloadable software, backup and recovery so we can cover the interest victims of actual presence. You. We do definitely help customers in every stage of their hybrid cloud acceleration journey. >>And if you take a look at the Hedvig protect if you take a look at the head back to, um, the ability to work in a cloud native fast, it is essentially a part of the DNA of that storage of the storage, right? So whether you're running on Prem, whether you're running it about adjacent, set up inside the cloud head, that can work with any compute environment and any storage environment that you went to essentially then feed, we build this distributed storage, and the reason that becomes important. It's pretty much highlighted with our announcement around the kubernetes and container support is that it makes it really easy to start maneuvering data from on Prem to the cloud, um, from cloud to cloud region to region, sort of that high availability that you know as customers make cloud first a reality and their organizations starts to become a critical requirement or ensuring the application of and some of the things that we've done now with kubernetes in making all of our integration for how we deliver storage for the kubernetes and container environments and being that they're completely kubernetes native and that they can support a Google in AWS and Azure. And of course, any on premises community set up just showcases the value that we can provide in giving them that level of data portability. And it basically provides a common foundation layer, or how any sort of the Dev ops teams will be operating in the way that those state full container state workloads. Donna Oh, sorry. Go >>ahead, mark area >>because you mentioned the metallic and azure partnership announcement and I just want to get on that. And one thing that run dimension, which is we are really excited about the announcement of partnership with Microsoft and all the different news cases that opens up that are SAS platform with Azure with office 3 65 and all of the great application stack it's on. If you're at the same time, to run this point. We are a multi cloud company. And whether that is other of the hyper scale clouds Mess GC, P. Ali at Oracle and IBM, etcetera, or Oliver, Great service writer burners. We continue to believe in customer choice, and we'll continue to drive unique event innovations across all of those platforms. >>All right, Don, I was wondering if we could just dig in a little bit more on some other kubernetes pieces you were talking about. Let me look at just the maturation of storage in general. You know, how do we had state back into containers in kubernetes environments? Help us see, You know what you're hearing from your customers. And you know how you how you're ready to meet their needs toe not only deliver storage, but as you say, Really? You know, full data protection in that environment? >>Certainly it So I mean, there's been a number of enhancements that happened in the kubernetes environment General over the last two years. One of the big ones was the creation of what the visit environment calls a persistent volume. And what that allows you to do is to really present storage to a a communities application. Do it be typically through what's called a CSR container storage interface that allows for state full data to be written, storage and be handled and reattached applications as you leverage them about that kubernetes. Um, as you can probably imagine that with the addition of the additional state full applications, some of the overall management now of stateless and state collapse become very talent. And that's primarily because many customers have been using some of the more traditional storage solutions to try to map that into these new state. Full scenario. And as you start to think about Dev ops organization, most Dev ops organizations want to work in the environment of their choice. Whether that's Google, whether that's AWS, Microsoft, uh, something that might be on Prem or a mix of different on Prem environments. What you typically find, at least in the kubernetes world, is there's seldom ever one single, very large kubernetes infrastructure cluster that's set to run, Dev asked. The way and production all at once. You usually have this spread out across a fairly global configuration, and so that's where some of these traditional mechanisms from traditional storage vendors really start to fall down because you can apply the same level of automation and controls in every single one of those environments. When you don't control the storage, let's say and that's really where interfacing Hedvig and allowing that sort of extension distribute storage platform brings about all of this automation policy control and really storage execution definition for the state. Full statehood workloads so that now managing the stateless and the state full becomes pretty easy and pretty easy to maintain when it comes to developing another Dev branch or simply trying to do disaster recovery or a J for production, >>any family actively do. That's a very interesting response, and the reality is customers are beginning to experiment with business. Very often they only have a virtual environment, and now they're also trying to expand into continuous. So Hedwig's ability to service primary storage for virtualization as well as containers actually gives their degree of flexibility and freedom for customers to try out containers and to start their contingent. Thank you familiar constructs. Everything is mellow where you just need to great with continuous >>Alright, bring a flexibility is something that I heard when you talk about the portfolio and the pricing as to how you put these pieces together. You actually talked about in the presentation this morning? Aggressive pricing. If you talk about, you know, kind of backup and recovery, help us understand, You know, convo 2020 how you're looking at your customers and you know how you put together your products, that to meet what they need at that. As you said, aggressive pricing? >>Absolutely. And you use this phrase a little bit earlier is to blow like flexibility. That's exactly what we're trying to get to the reason why we are reconstructing our portfolio so that we have these very granular use case aligned data management services to provide the cloud like flexibility. Customers don't have the same data management needs all the time. Great. So they can pick and choose the exact solution that need because there are delivered on the same platform that can enable out the solution investment, you know, And that's the reality. We know that many of our customers are going to start with one and keep adding more and more services, because that's what we see as ongoing conversations that gives us the ability to really praise the entry products very aggressively when compared to competition, especially when we go against single product windows. This uses a lot of slammed where we can start with a really aggressively priced product and enable more capabilities as we move forward to give you an idea, we launched disaster recovery today. I would say that compared to the so the established vendors India, we would probably come in at about 25 to 40% of the Priceline because it depends on the environment and what not. But you're going to see that that's the power of bringing to the table. You start small and then depending on what your needs are, you have the flexibility to run on either. More data management capabilities are more workloads, depending on what your needs will be. I think it's been a drag from a partner perspective, less with muscle. If you want a little bit more than that, >>yes, I mean, that goes back to the idea of being ableto simply scale across government use functionality. For example, things like the fact that our disaster recovery offering the Newman doesn't require backup really allows us to have those Taylor conversations around use cases, applications >>a >>zealous platforms. You think about one of the the big demands that we've had coming in from customers and partners, which is help me have a D R scenario or a VR set up in my environment that doesn't require people to go put their hands on boxes and cables, which was one of those things that a year ago we were having. This conversation would not necessarily have been as important as it is now, but that ability to target those specific, urgent use cases without having to go across on sort of sell things that aren't necessarily associated with the immediate pain points really makes those just makes us ineffective. Offer. >>Yeah, you bring up some changing priorities. I think almost everybody will agree that the number one priority we're hearing from customers is around security. So whether I'm adopting more cloud, I'm looking at different solutions out there. Security has to be front and center. Could we just kind of go down the line and give us the update as to how security fits and all the pieces we've been discussing? >>I guess I'm talking about change, right, so I'll start. The security for us is built into everything that we do the same view you're probably going to get from each of us because security is burden. It's not a board on, and you would see it across a lot of different images. If you take our backup and recovery and disaster recovery, for instance, a lot of ransomware protection capabilities built into the solution. For instance, we have anomaly detection that is built into the platform. If we see any kind of spurious activity happening all of a sudden, we know that that might be a potential and be reported so that the customer can take a quick look at air Gap isolation, encryption by default. So many features building. And when you come to disaster recovery, encryption on the wire, a lot of security aspects we've been to every part of the portfolio don't. >>Consequently, with Hedvig, it's probably no surprise that when that this platform was developed and as we've continued development, security has always been at the core of what we're doing is stored. So what? It's for something as simple as encryption on different volume, ensuring the communication between applications and the storage platform itself, and the way the distributors towards platform indicates those are all incredibly secured. Lock down almost such for our own our own protocols for ensuring that, um, you know, only we're able to talk within our own, our own system. Beyond that, though, I mean it comes down to ensure that data in rest data in transit. It's always it's always secure. It's also encrypted based upon the level of control that using any is there one. And then beyond just the fact of keeping the data secure. You have things like immutable snapshots. You have declared of data sovereignty to ensure that you can put essentially virtual fence barriers for where data can be transported in this highly distributed platform. Ah, and then, from a user perspective, there's always level security for providing all seeking roll on what groups organization and consume storage or leverage. Different resource is the storage platform and then, of course, from a service provider's perspective as well, providing that multi tenanted access s so that users can have access to what they want when they want it. It's all about self service, >>and the idea there is that obviously, we're all familiar with the reports of increased bad actors in the current environment to increased ransomware attacks and so forth. And be a part of that is addressed by what wrong and done said in terms of our core technology. Part of that also, though, is addressed by being able to work across platforms and environments because, you know, as we see the acceleration of state tier one applications or entire data center, evacuations into service provider or cloud environments has happened. You know, this could have taken 5 10 years in a in a normal cycle. But we've seen this happen overnight has cut this. Companies have needed to move those I T environments off science into managed environments and our ability to protect the applications, whether they're on premises, whether they're in the cloud or in the most difficult near where they live. In both cases, in both places at once, is something that it's really important to our customers to be able to ensure that in the end, security posture >>great Well, final thing I have for all three of you is you correctly noted that this is not the end, but along the journey that you're going along with your customers. So you know, with all three of you would like to get a little bit. Give us directionally. What should we be looking at? A convo. Take what was announced today and a little bit of look forward towards future. >>Directionally we should be looking at a place where we're delivering even greater simplicity to our customers. And that's gonna be achieved through multiple aspects. 1st 1 it's more technologies coming together. Integrating. We announced three important integration story. We announced the Microsoft partnership a couple of weeks back. You're gonna see us more longer direction. The second piece is technology innovation. We believe in it. That's what Differentiators has a very different company and we'll continue building it along the dimensions off data awareness, data, automation and agility. And the last one continued obsession with data. What more can we do with it? How can we drive more insights for our customers We're going to see is introducing more capabilities along those dimensions? No. >>And I think Rhonda tying directly into what you're highlighting there. I'm gonna go back to what we teased out 10 months ago at calm Bolt. Go there in Colorado in this very on this very program and talk about how, in the unification of ah ah, data and storage management, that vision, we're going to make more and more reality. I think the, uh, the announcements we've made here today let some of the things that we've done in between the lead up to this point is just proof of our execution. And ah, I can happily and excitedly tell you, we're just getting warmed up. It's going to be, ah, gonna be some fun future ahead. >>And I think studio in the running that out with the partner angle. Obviously, we're going to continue to produce great products and solutions that we're going to make our partners relevant. In those conversations with customers, I think we're also going to continue to invest in alternative business models, services, things like migration services, audit services, other things that build on top of this core technology to provide value for customers and additional opportunities for our partners >>to >>build out their their offerings around combo technologies. >>All right, well, thank you. All three of you for joining us. It was great to be able to dig in, understand those pieces. I know you've got lots of resources online for people to learn more. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you too. Thank you. Alright, and stay with us. So we've got one more interview left for the Cube's coverage of con vault. Future Ready, students. Mannan. Thanks. As always for watching the Cube. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah